What is Tezos, and why is it notable for its NFT development?

Introduction

Founder’s influence helps Tezos achieve high funding

The self-amending feature of Tezos

Tezos misses the best window of 2020 due to an internal team strife

NFT becomes Tezos’ opportunity

Introduction: Introduce Tezos, a venerable Blockchain network, in clear, logical, and easy-to-understand language, using a storytelling writing style.

Founded in 2014, almost at the same time as Ethereum, Tezos is an old project from the crypto community. Like Ethereum, it received massive funding during the ICO boom in 2017 but then faded from public view due to team infighting and other factors, missing out on a great opportunity to grow during the DeFi summer of 2020.

Nevertheless, Tezos appears to be returning to its previous peak in the second half of 2021 by focusing on its low-cost NFT business. The following article will provide an overview of Tezos’ evolution as well as a breakdown of its features.

Founder’s influence helps Tezos achieve high funding

Tezos has been around in the crypto world since its white paper was published in 2014.

The name Tezos, which is derived from the ancient Greek word meaning “contract of wisdom,” reflects the founders’ vision of changing the world through smart contracts. Tezos was founded by Arthur Breitman, who grew up in France, and his wife, Kathleen.

From 2013 to 2016, Breitman was Vice President at Morgan Stanley, and his wife Kathleen worked at Accenture and R3CEV, a distributed ledger startup.

Breitman, who soon left Morgan Stanley, launched Tezos’ initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017, raising 656,270,000 Bitcoin and 361,122,000 Ethereum, or $232 million, in just two weeks, making it the most expensive ICO project in the world at the time. It included investors such as the Winklevoss brothers, founders of the Gemini exchange, and Tim Draper, founder of DFJ Investment Fund. Few projects today can match this level of funding, and Tezos’ popularity was evident at the time. However, the Tezos blockchain network did not officially complete its main online presence until 2020.

The self-amending feature of Tezos

Tezos’ mining process is called “baking,” most likely influenced by French culture, and this unique “baking” mechanism gives Tezos obvious self-amending properties.

The Tezos token is known as XTZ, and XTZ holders can vote to support technology upgrades and iterations of the project without the need for a hard fork, ensuring the project’s stability and self-amending feature. Because when a better technical solution is proposed, all XTZ holders can vote to support it in order to maximize the project’s efficiency.

Also, when the number of staked XTZ exceeds 10,000 (a roll), the user can become a “baker” (or a node), but 8.5% of the total staked amount must be used as a deposit. If you become a node, you can enjoy rewards, but if you are found using it for the wrong reasons, you will automatically forfeit the full amount of the deposit. Ordinary users who cannot reach the threshold of becoming a node can also inject their assets into other nodes with crowdfunding or shareholding to obtain mining revenue proportionally.

Many people compare Tezos’ mechanism to EOS’s DPOS. Still, there is a significant difference between the two: EOS is a 21 super nodes decision system, and these 21 super nodes are elected and have centralized features. Tezos, on the other hand, has up to 80,000 nodes and everyone can apply to become a node by staking 10,000 XTZ, so it is more decentralized. Furthermore, Tezos is nearly the creator of staking mining, with founder and investor influence, which gave it a clear advantage in the 2017 ICO funding wave.

Tezos misses the best window of 2020 due to an internal team strife

Why was Tezos almost non-existent in the bull market of 2021, despite its obvious first-mover advantage and excellent mechanism design? Because Tezos was mired in a team-infighting crisis, making the project semi-stagnant for a long time. Following the completion of the financing in 2017, the core members of the Tezos team began to split over the use of funds and other issues, causing widespread concern from the outside world. Following that, Tezos faced several public prosecutions in the United States for allegedly violating security laws. Tezos’ development progress was hampered by numerous twists and turns, and the main net will not be completed until September 2020.

The summer of DeFi was coming to an end at the time, and Tezos had almost missed the first wave of DeFi’s bonus entirely. Despite the fact that the big bull market at the end of 2020 had begun at the time, Tezos, whose ecological construction was in a state of disarray, couldn’t even come up with a convincing story and floundered throughout the first half of 2021. Later-arriving public chains such as Solana, Avalanche, and BSC have emerged as the market’s dominant force. Tezos, on the other hand, reacted and completed its comeback in the second half of 2021 with the help of the NFT summer.

NFT becomes Tezos’ opportunity

Tezos became more well-known to NFT players in the second half of 2021 as a result of its self-developed crypto-art platform Hic Et Nunc, a Latin word meaning “here and now” that is philosophical and more appealing to art collectors. There are three main benefits of HEN：

1. Low cost: the majority of NFT works on HEN prices are only a few dollars, and they even offer free products, which can have a powerful effect on the majority of new users at the start of the NFT.

2. Rich in forms: In the early stages of NFT going viral, the public’s impression of it was still in the form of pictures, but HEN in NFT has many forms, including web pages, video, motion pictures, audio, and small programs, which is obvious when compared to a number of competing products.

1. Strong user consensus: in its early days, HEN had a clear geek positioning, which was shaped by marketing. Later on, HEN established a series of strong social attribute play methods for NFT creators such as rewarding, liking, and inviting, creating a strong centripetal force and deriving a fission effect to catch up with the windfall period.

Furthermore, Tezos’ extremely low Gas fee has greatly aided HEN’s popularity. Surprisingly, Tezos’ main concept of eco-friendly blockchains has won the hearts of young people concerned about carbon neutrality.

PwC reported this year in a report on Tezos’ dramatic improvements in energy efficiency since the switch from PoW to PoS. The report emphasizes that, despite increased Tezos network activity, the network’s carbon footprint has decreased significantly. The Tezos blockchain processes 50 million daily transactions, with the network’s total energy footprint equivalent to just 17 world citizens. The network’s energy efficiency has increased by 70%, while the estimated electricity demand per transaction is 30% lower than in 2020.

Tezos is going in the right direction with its in-depth work with NFT, but what are the detailed issues?

Of course, Tezos’ NFT platform continues to have issues. The first is its low threshold, resulting in an unusually low rate of quality that gradually becomes an object of curiosity and teasing for some users later on, with no value for trading, investment, appreciation, or collection. The second is the sloppy drawing style. Finally, the Tezos public chain’s competitiveness in the NFT field is still unable to overcome the stereotype of “cheap” in a single dimension.

While Tezos missed the opportunity in the early stages of the industry, it was able to regain momentum by utilizing the cost-effective route. However, Solana, which has a much better ecology, has already replicated Tezos’ approach to NFT, with significantly better results. So how to construct its moat is critical for Tezos. At the end of this article, we’ll go over some of the most popular NFT applications in the Tezos ecosystem:

1. objkt.com: encrypted art platform, the overall layout is more similar to Rarible, with smoother and better usage features.

2. Henext: a tool for displaying crypto works, similar in style to Instagram.

3. NFT Button: a universal NFT trading platform where users can enjoy discounts for trading.

4. Kalamint: a crypto art platform where works on sale are subject to vetting, with a lottery function.

5. OneOf: a music-based NFT trading platform.

6. Galleon: software wallet for the Tezos chain, mobile available on iOS, with an Android version coming soon.

7. Kukai: a wallet built for digital assets and NFTs that connect seamlessly with the experience and apps on Tezos.