Tezos

A practical guide to shielding tez and tokens on Tezos using the Shield Bridge platform

In a recent article, we looked at how Umami Wallet added support for shielded tez transactions, making a long-standing Tezos protocol feature much easier to use in practice. We also briefly mentioned something important: shielding on Tezos isn’t limited to tez alone. Through Shield Bridge, users can also shield FA2 tokens (such as USDT, tzBTC, and others).

In this article, we take a closer look at Shield Bridge itself. We’ll go through what it is, how it’s used in practice, and how it fits into Tezos’ approach to privacy when moving tez or tokens between public and shielded use. But first, let’s add some context.

Why Private Transactions Matter

On most blockchains, transaction details are public by default. Sending a simple payment can reveal more than intended, like balances, transaction history, and patterns that have nothing to do with the payment itself.

Wanting private transactions isn’t about hiding activity or doing something illegal. It’s about basic financial boundaries. Paying someone shouldn’t automatically give them access to your entire transaction and balance history, just as it wouldn’t in traditional finance.

At the same time, privacy doesn’t mean avoiding accountability. There are many situations where transparency is required, such as audits, tax reporting, and regulatory oversight, and that information should still be available when needed. The difference is that disclosure should be intentional, not automatic.

This is the balance Tezos aims to support, enabling private use when it makes sense, without removing the ability to disclose transaction data to the appropriate parties.

What Is Shield Bridge

Shield Bridge is one of the tools that makes private transactions on Tezos possible in practice.

It’s a platform that lets users access shielded transactions by connecting a regular Tezos wallet. You don’t need a special wallet or a separate setup to get started. You can shield funds with the wallet you already use, then manage shielded activity through Shield Bridge.

Shielding isn’t limited to tez. Shield Bridge also supports FA2 tokens, which means assets like stablecoins or other tokenized assets can be moved into shielded use, not just XTZ.

Shield Bridge also supports viewing keys. These allow users or businesses to export a read-only view of shielded balances and transaction history when disclosure is required, for example, for accounting, audits, or tax reporting, without giving up control of funds.

Shield Bridge moves assets between public Tezos addresses and a shielded set using the Sapling protocol. Assets aren’t mixed, handed over to a custodian, or removed from the chain, transactions are still validated and enforced, with the difference being how much information is visible by default.

Using Shield Bridge in Practice

Start by connecting a regular Tezos wallet, just as you would with any other application. This wallet is used to move funds into and out of shielded use.

Before you can make shielded transactions, you’ll also need a shielded account (their addresses start with “zet…”). The first time you use Shield Bridge, you either create a new shielded account or load an existing one using a 24-word mnemonic. This account is separate from your regular wallet and is where shielded balances live.

Once both are set up, the interface guides you through three actions:

ShieldChoose an asset (XTZ or a supported FA2 token), select your shielded account, and enter the amount. This moves funds from your public wallet into the shielded set.

TransferSend assets between shielded accounts. These transfers are validated by the protocol, but amounts and counterparties are not publicly visible.

UnshieldMove funds out of the shielded set to any normal Tezos address. This doesn’t have to be the wallet you originally used to shield funds, you can unshield directly to another person’s address or any standard Tezos account.

For transfers and unshielding, Shield Bridge also offers an optional injection service. By paying a fixed 1 tez fee, the transaction can be broadcast on your behalf, instead of directly from your public wallet. This helps reduce the link between your wallet and shielded activity. Using this service is optional, but it can strengthen privacy by reducing the direct connection between your wallet and the on-chain transaction, since the transaction is broadcast by the service instead of directly from your wallet.

Shield Bridge also supports viewing keys, which can be exported from the settings page. A viewing key allows a shielded account to be loaded in read-only mode inside the platform. Anyone with the key can see balances and transaction history, but cannot move funds.

A Practical Example

Let’s say I hire a Tezos artist to design a logo for me. We agree on a price, but I don’t want that payment to expose my full wallet balance or transaction history.

I go to Shield Bridge, connect my regular Tezos wallet, and shield the amount of tez (or USDT) I’m going to use for the payment. Those funds are now part of the shielded set and no longer sit in my public balance.

From there, I have two options.

If the artist already has a shielded address, I can send the payment directly to that address. The transaction is validated as usual, but the amount and the counterparty aren’t publicly visible. This is the actual way to make a private transaction.

But even if they don’t have a shielded address, I can instead unshield the payment directly to their normal Tezos address. The funds come out of the shielded set and land in their wallet, without revealing anything about my broader balance or transaction history. This way though, I have to use the injection service, so the transaction is also broadcast on my behalf, reducing any direct link between my wallet and the payment. Without the injection service, they would be able to see on the explorer my normal Tezos wallet being the one that paid the fee for the unshielding operation, and they could link it with the payment.

From the artist’s side, they simply receive the funds. There’s no need for them to see where the money came from beyond the payment itself, and no visibility into anything else I hold or do on-chain.

In an ideal scenario where shielded transactions are a normal part of everyday use, both sides would already have shielded addresses and payments could stay entirely within the shielded set. But even at this early stage, Shield Bridge can already add meaningful privacy to everyday web3 interactions, without requiring anyone else to change how they operate.

On top of that, if I need to show a business partner that the payment was made, I can export a viewing key for my shielded account and share it with them. They can load the account in read-only mode and see the payment for themselves, without having the ability to move funds or interfere in any way.

The example above shows how Shield Bridge can be used today, but it’s worth keeping one thing in mind: the level of privacy shielded transactions provides depends on several factors. Two of the most important ones are how actively the shielded set is used and how many people are participating in it.

Like any system based on privacy sets, shielded transactions become more effective as activity increases. The more funds move in and out, and the more transactions happen inside the shielded set, the harder it becomes to infer meaningful information from the outside.

Shield Bridge isn’t a finished or perfect interface, and shielded transactions aren’t yet a default part of everyday use on Tezos. But they are real, usable, and already capable of adding privacy to normal interactions, especially for people who take the time to understand how they work.

If privacy on-chain is something you care about, the most practical next step isn’t theory or debate, but experimentation. Try shielding a small amount, send a test transaction, unshield it again, and get a feel for the flow. Like most things on Tezos, it becomes clearer once you’ve actually used it. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try it!

Shield Bridge: Adding Privacy to Everyday Tezos Transactions was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Christmas Note to the Tezos Community

Hello Tezos community,

It’s holiday season, and this week feels like the right moment to step back from the usual rhythm and simply talk to each other.

Looking back on the past year through the lens of the Baking Sheet, what stands out most is not any single announcement, but the steady way Tezos kept moving forward. Not loudly. Not chaotically. Just consistently, with care, precision, and intention.

On the protocol side, this year reminded us why Tezos governance matters. We saw upgrades like Rio make everyday participation smoother, shortening cycles and reducing friction for bakers and delegators alike. Seoul went live with changes that quietly improved security and usability, from native multisigs to simpler unstaking. And as the year wrapped up, Tallinn moved through governance with strong participation, showing once again that this community does not just talk about decentralization, it practices it.

Etherlink had a big year too. Apple Farm brought waves of activity and experimentation, showing what happens when incentives meet real usage. Farfadet went live, pushing performance forward, and when an issue appeared, the response was fast, transparent, and accountable. The follow up with Etherlink 6.1 was a reminder that shipping quickly only works when teams are willing to explain the details and fix things properly. That kind of openness builds trust over time.

Beyond infrastructure, the ecosystem continued to widen in ways that felt tangible. Lyzi enabling crypto payments at Porsche and Lamborghini dealerships did not feel gimmicky. It felt logical. Revolut dropping fees on Tezos delegation rewards made participation simpler for millions of users who may never open a terminal or read a whitepaper. Umami wallet shipping shielded transactions brought privacy into the hands of everyday users without asking them to change how they interact with the network.

And then there were the creative moments. Art on Tezos continued to show up in galleries, festivals, and conversations that reached well beyond crypto circles. Events like TezDev in Cannes brought builders, artists, and community members together in ways that felt genuinely energizing. Tools kept improving. New collectives formed. Experiments launched, some quietly, some boldly, all contributing to a living culture rather than a static ecosystem.

Gaming deserves its own pause here. Seeing projects like Reaper Actual take shape this year was a reminder that Tezos is not just a place for ideas, but a place for ambition. Persistent worlds, real time systems, and player driven economies are not easy problems, and watching teams take them on with patience and realism has been one of the more exciting threads to follow.

And through all of this, the Baking Sheet kept doing what it has always tried to do. Slow things down just enough to tell the story properly. To connect the dots between governance votes, technical upgrades, creative work, and real world adoption. To make space for context, not just headlines.

This week, things are quiet. Many teams are offline. Commits slow down. Conversations pause. That is healthy. A network that never rests is not sustainable, and neither is a community.

So today, more than anything, we want to say thank you. Thank you for reading, for sharing, for debating, for building, for voting, and for sticking around through both the exciting moments and the quieter ones. Tezos works because people care enough to keep showing up year after year.

We will be back next week with our regular programming, ready to jump into what the new year brings. For now, we hope you are enjoying some rest, some warmth, and some time with the people who matter most to you.

Merry Christmas, and thank you for another year together.

The Baking Sheet team. 🎄

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Umami adds shielded tez transactions and makes a long-standing protocol feature easier to explore

Privacy on Tezos isn’t new, but it hasn’t always been easy to use. While the protocol has supported shielded transactions for some time, they’ve largely stayed out of sight for most everyday users.

With a recent update, Umami Wallet brought support for shielded tez transactions directly into the wallet. It’s not a brand-new concept, and it’s not the first time this functionality appears on Tezos, but it does make privacy more accessible and easier to use in practice.

To understand why this matters, it helps to step back and look at what shielded transactions actually are, and why privacy looks very different on a public blockchain than it does in everyday finance.

Why Privacy Matters on a Public Blockchain

Most people don’t think much about blockchain privacy until they imagine using it in a normal, everyday setting.

Take a simple example: paying for a coffee using a public blockchain. The payment itself might be small, but the person receiving it can see far more than just the price of the coffee. They can see the address the payment came from, how much it holds, and every other transaction associated with it. That information is public by default and remains so indefinitely.

In traditional finance, this would feel unusual. Paying someone doesn’t give them access to your full bank account history. Yet on most blockchains, that level of exposure is the norm.

Privacy in this context isn’t about secrecy or avoiding responsibility. It’s about basic financial boundaries, not publishing more information than necessary just to make a payment. For individuals, this can mean reducing risks like profiling or doxxing. For businesses, it can mean protecting counterparties, strategies, or cash flows that don’t need to be public.

Shielded transactions exist to bring blockchain usage closer to these everyday expectations.

What “Shielded Tez” Actually Means

On Tezos, privacy is achieved using Sapling, a privacy technology originally developed in the Zcash ecosystem and later integrated into Tezos in 2021. Shielded transactions are handled through smart contract systems supported by the protocol. Each system manages its own set of private transactions, which we can refer to as a shielded set.

You can think of a shielded set as a part of the chain where transactions are still validated and enforced, but their details are private. Amounts and counterparties don’t appear on block explorers, even though the network can still confirm that all the rules are being followed. The chain still enforces correctness and prevents double-spending.

Like with any blockchain using Sapling technology, the privacy a shielded transaction provides depends on the size and activity of the shielded set. The larger and more active the set, the stronger the privacy.

In practical terms, shielded tez can allow users to transact on Tezos without publishing their full financial history to the public by default. That’s the core idea, and it’s enough to understand why this feature exists.

How Shielded Transactions Work in Umami

Umami makes shielded transactions easy to use with a familiar wallet interface. The process works in three main steps:

Shield your tezFrom your normal account, you can move funds into a separate shielded address (they start with “zet…”) using the “Shield” button. This transfers your tez into the shielded set, where transaction details are private.

Transact privatelyOnce your tez is in the shielded set, you can send shielded transactions between shielded addresses within the same set. These transfers do not appear on block explorers, keeping amounts and counterparties private within the shielded set.

Unshield when neededIf you need to interact with dApps or services, you can move your funds back to a normal address using the “Unshield” button. The unshielding action is visible on-chain, but the activity inside the shielded set remains private.

To further protect privacy, Umami handles the fees required for shielded transactions through a dedicated account. This means you don’t need to pay those fees from your normal address, which could otherwise make it easier to correlate shielded activity with publicly visible transactions.

Try It, Break It, Get Comfortable With It

If you’ve never used shielded transactions before, the best way to understand them is simply to try them with small amounts and see how the flow works in practice. Shielding, sending between shielded addresses, and unshielding again is much easier to grasp once you’ve gone through it yourself.

Features like this tend to feel abstract until they’re familiar. Wallet-level support makes experimentation low-risk and approachable, and that’s often how more advanced features slowly move from “interesting” to “normal”.

There’s also room for this to grow. Tezos already supports shielded transfers beyond tez itself, opening the door to future support for shielded token transfers, something we’ve already seen explored on platforms like Shield Bridge. Bringing similar capabilities into wallets over time would make private transactions even more practical across the ecosystem.

Personally, I’d also like to see more wallets and applications converge around shared shielded sets, rather than each tool creating its own isolated one. Privacy strength improves with activity and liquidity, and concentrating usage makes shielded transactions more effective for everyone.

Umami’s update doesn’t try to solve everything at once, and that’s fine. It gives users a clean entry point into of Tezos’ privacy. What comes next will depend on how many people decide to actually explore it, so don’t just read about it, go test it!

Shielded Tez Comes to Umami was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Game-Theoretic Evolution

Tezos has been rebuilding its foundations quietly for years, not with a single dramatic overhaul, but through a sequence of deliberate upgrades that are still unfolding. By the time Paris arrived, the shift became undeniable: Tezos moved from a baker-only security model to a hybrid one where bakers and native stakers lock real stake directly in the protocol and secure the chain together.

This wasn’t just “more participation”, it strengthened the economic logic of the network. On Tezos, staking is literal, misbehavior is slashed, honesty is rewarded, and alignment is enforced by mathematics. More actors now carry real skin in the game, broadening distribution, tightening incentives, and increasing resilience even as the number of bakers decreased (I’ll expand on this later).

In this article, I’m going to explain why this shift was the right move and how it emerged across several upgrades.

Delegators, Stakers, and Bakers: How They Fit Together

Bakers

Bakers are the core operators of Tezos. They run the infrastructure, produce and validate blocks, and secure the chain. In the original LDPoS model, only their bonded stake provided real economic protection, the network’s security rested entirely on them.

Delegators

Most users are delegators. They keep their tez liquid but lend their voting weight to a baker. They help shape consensus without running infrastructure, but their capital isn’t at risk.

Stakers (post-Paris)

Paris introduced something new: native stakers. Instead of building a baking setup, they simply lock their tez directly in the protocol and ‘rent’ a baker’s engine for a small fee. When they do, it stacks onto the baker’s staked balance, strengthening that baker’s weight. The twist is that their rewards never pass through the baker, payouts come straight from the protocol, trustlessly. For the first time, users could earn more than traditional delegators while directly reinforcing network security. No middlemen, no manual payouts, just a clean, on-chain relationship where staking becomes a true first class way to protect the network.

Integrating Stakers Into Consensus

Before Paris, only bakers had something at stake. They were the only people walking around with real skin in the game. Delegators participated indirectly, but their capital wasn’t exposed. And while the model worked, it concentrated responsibility in the hands of a relatively small group.

After Paris, the story changed. Now, stakers, normal users who don’t want to run a node, can bond their funds directly and share responsibility with bakers. Their commitment carries real weight: bonded stake from stakers counts 3x more than delegated tez when it comes to governance, and hence earns about 3x more rewards than simple delegation. Suddenly, the vault has more honest and committed guards, each with something valuable on the line and a stronger voice in how the network moves forward. And more people with something to lose are always good for security.

This reshaped the social structure of Tezos:

Before Paris → only about 7% of the total supply was actually securing the network, coming exclusively from the bonds (stake) posted by bakers.

After Paris-Quebec-Rio-Seoul → Security is now shared between bakers and individual stakers, broadening participation, improving distribution, and strengthening overall resilience. As of today, this combined bonded stake is ~ 27%.

The Game Theory Foundations of Hybrid Proof-of-Stake

One of the most overlooked parts of Tezos’ evolution is how the staking model reshaped the incentives behind the network. Blockchains, at their core, are not just technology, they are economic machines. They only work when the people inside them are rewarded for doing the right thing and punished for doing the wrong thing. In other words: software becomes law, and incentives become gravity.

Tezos leans heavily into that logic. It doesn’t pretend to be Proof of Stake. It is Proof of Stake, in the literal sense: stake can be taken away. And with the introduction of an adjustable slashing mechanism, the protocol can calibrate penalties to the severity of misbehavior, amplifying the precision of its game-theoretic design. That single design choice changes everything.

To understand why, imagine a small town where everyone is responsible for guarding a shared vault. In some systems, the guards carry empty guns, symbolic tools that look serious but carry no actual consequences if someone breaks the rules. In Tezos, the guards carry fully loaded, real ones. And now, depending on the severity of the breach, the response can scale accordingly. If you break the rules, the penalty is not theoretical. It’s immediate, measurable, and tunable. Your “stake,” your contribution to securing the town’s vault, can be slashed, lightly or heavily, depending on the offense.

Economists call this credible penalties, and it’s the backbone of game theory. If breaking the rules is costly, most people won’t break them. If following the rules pays well, most people will follow them. The system doesn’t rely on trust, goodwill, or reputation. It relies on alignment, and Tezos adds the nuance of calibrated discipline.

Aligning Today’s Incentives With Tomorrow’s Tezos X Architecture

But incentive alignment doesn’t stop there. Faster cycles tighten the feedback loop. When rewards arrive sooner, penalties arrive sooner as well. It’s like giving the town a daily accounting instead of a monthly one, mistakes can’t hide for long. Good behavior is reinforced, and bad behavior is corrected almost immediately.

The Data Availability Layer (DAL) adds another dimension. It compensates participants for doing work that benefits everyone: storing and serving data reliably. Honest work brings more rewards, and careless work risks losing them. But there’s an additional layer of meaning here: bakers who support the DAL aren’t just earning rewards, they’re signaling belief in the long term direction of Tezos.

The DAL is not an optional accessory; it is a foundational component of the Tezos X roadmap, where a canonical rollup becomes the central scaling path. In other words, DAL participation isn’t just technical participation. It’s commitment. And the protocol rewards that commitment. Once again, the incentives line up perfectly: help the system, and the system helps you.

Defense by Commitment: A Castle Guarded by Skilled Committed Defenders

And here’s the surprising part: even though the number of bakers is lower than before, the network is more secure. Why? Because what matters in game theory is not the number of players, it’s how much they stand to lose. Today, more stake is bonded across more participants. The “security wall” around the network is thicker, higher, and shared.

It’s the difference between a castle guarded by many unarmed volunteers and one guarded by fewer, highly skilled and committed soldiers whose lives depend on defending it. The second castle is safer every time.

Some blockchains rely on reputation to maintain order. Others rely on foundation influence or informal social rules. Tezos relies on mathematics. The protocol itself administers the incentives. There’s no negotiation, no privilege, no exceptions. The rules apply equally to everyone, and the safest, most profitable choice, consistently and predictably, is to behave honestly.

A Faster, Smarter, and More Human Staking Experience

Across several upgrades, the network has quietly become sharper, faster, and far more user friendly, like a fortress that not only reinforces its walls but learns to move its gates with precision. Resilience improved first: inactive bakers are cycled out quickly and restored just as fast, creating a self-correcting guard rotation that rewards consistent uptime. Then came speed. Cycle times dropped from ~2.8 days to 1 day, turning staking updates, delegation changes, and unlocks into a smooth experience. And finally, the user journey was streamlined: Unstaking became effortless, and automated helpers (hello Finn) now handle the mechanics behind the scenes. The result is a staking system that feels modern, powerful internally, seamless externally.

In Summary

https://tzkt.io/

Tezos didn’t reinvent its staking model overnight, it evolved through a long sequence of upgrades, each approved through on-chain governance and shaped by community input. These changes gradually shifted Tezos from a baker-only security model to a hybrid one where bakers and native stakers now secure the chain together. The result is a broader, healthier distribution of bonded stake, rising from ~7% to roughly ~27%, a level that now sits within industry standards for Proof-of-Stake security. And that number is still climbing quietly, as more participants choose to commit real stake, strengthen the network, and earn significantly better rewards than traditional delegators. Quietly, collaboratively, and mathematically, the network fortified its walls, and did so with the community steering every step of the process.

How Tezos Strengthened Its Walls Without Making a Sound was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tezos Community Rewards — November 2025

Announcing the CRP Winners for November 2025!

Greetings Tezos Community,

We are pleased to announce the winners of the “Community Rewards Program” CRP for the month of November 2025!

For more details about the various categories, please refer to the rewards page on the Tezos Commons website.

The Community Rewards Program is a Tezos Commons Foundation initiative aimed at fostering adoption and supporting the Tezos ecosystem. Every month up to 5,000 tez are rewarded to those that stand out in merit and act in the interest of the Tezos ecosystem as a whole.

In an endeavor to make it easier for community members to nominate their favorite contributors to the ecosystem, the nomination form has been drastically streamlined. Now containing only three questions, it takes less than 30 seconds to submit a nomination.

Don’t have 30 seconds? You can tag any Discord message, Reddit post or tweet with #TezosCRP and we will collect them as well!

This is the fifth iteration of the program, and we will continue to make changes based on community feedback. Just like the Tezos blockchain, we will be continually evolving this program.

Numerous factors are used when evaluating submissions, such as quality of submissions, quality of activity, number of submissions, and verifiable proof of activity done by the nominee (no single factor is determinative of a winner, as all factors were weighed to select winners). The judges would like to note that for each category, they are looking for the respective monthly related activity, meaning submissions should reflect activities done for that current month, i.e.; month of November activities.

Without further delay, here are the results of the winners, below.

Helping Hand Award

@SkullDegenClub_

@AuRo404

@paraxenod

@malsheep56

@UnitedSaints

@Jundaboom

Influencer Award

@_TransparentArt

@uzzy_arts

@HashSosaHash

@marco_port

@dexp0nential

@cle0fis

Tez Dev Award

@ccubetez

@Rexflexasaurus

@AndrewKishino

@webidente

@JackTezos

Assimilation Award

@jakestudyos

@JarrettPinto

@MiRetratito

@ZeroUnboundArt

@ZerorezeroA

@_Gellefin

@sansfomo

@idjasaund

Patissier Award

@Zir0h

@fafo_lab

@BakingBenjamins

@riseuptez

Tezos Tutor Award

@TozartWeb3

@TheTezos

@proto_designer

@TeraBitcoins

@tezosartnetwork

Formal Verification Award

@WiseSigmaToad

TEO Award

@Albert_1Camus

@FendelMarc

@unrealb0x

Nominations Are Open For December

With December underway, we have begun accepting nominations for this month. If you know someone who deserves a reward for their contributions to the community or have ideas about other categories that should be recognized, then please fill out a nomination form located here, or you can tag a post (or discord message) with #TezosCRP.

As mentioned previously, we are still working on long-term improvements to this program. We know this program is far from perfect, so please bear with us while we strive to improve this program based on community feedback. Stay tuned, stay creative, and keep nominating!

As a reminder to the reward winners, the awards are all distributed through Kukai and DirectAuth. If you have issues claiming your awards, please message us here.

Tezos Community Rewards — November 2025 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How A Collective Of “Web3” Artists Experiences Art Basel

I experienced Art Basel for the first time this year through a road trip that became one of the most meaningful journeys I’ve taken in a long time.

This story centers on a group of artists who call themselves The Temple, and how spending a week alongside them gave me a view of Miami Art Week I never could have planned for. It also became a reminder of why I care so deeply about art, community, and the role Tezos plays in both.

I came to Miami with a clear intention. I wanted to observe Tezos’ presence during one of the largest art gatherings in the world, understand how cross-chain artists are moving today, deepen my community relationships, and gather unfiltered insights on the broader art landscape.

The trip started with inviting two internet friends into my house. They met my wife and cats and then helped me pack my bags before hitting the road. Within hours of being in a car with Paper Buddha and MykNash, I could already tell this trip was going to matter. Not just professionally, but personally.

What unfolded over the next week gave me hope for the future of digital art and reminded me that the joy is found in the journey itself, not the destination.

I decided early on to let the breeze take me, and the universe delivered. I said yes more than I planned to. In turn I witnessed traditional art on the main Art Basel floor, digital work in the Zero10 section, Beeple’s Regular Animals, the UBS VIP collectors lounge, Miami Art Week satellite events, grassroots house gatherings, Pizza DAO parties, rooftop jam sessions, celebrity sound baths, and even a night spent at a commune called Artist House, sharing music around a fire pit.

Meeting The Temple

The Temple is not a group you can summarize in one article. Their story feels more like a novel still being written. For now, this is a snapshot, one I plan to keep expanding as more Temple journeys unfold.

At its core, The Temple operates like a touring band of painters, animators, musicians, projection artists, collectors, wellness advocates, and technologists. They have been moving through NFT events together since 2021, and their bond is immediately visible. Everyone contributes. Everyone is supported.

Arriving at an Airbnb for a week-long stay with people you have mostly met online can feel intimidating. Some might even call it reckless. For me, it felt like stepping into a creative safe space. Once everyone arrived, the house settled into something cozy and functional, a much-needed home base for the wild week ahead.

Gear stacked in corners. Paintings hung temporarily beside sticker-covered laptops. Conversations flowing from room to room. Vegetables being chopped for dinner. Experimental lasers bouncing off walls. Carpools forming for supply runs. This was a functioning creative organism, not a loose network of collaborators.

Paper Buddha served as the connective tissue. His presence brings ease into every room, and his ability to move fluidly between Ethereum, Tezos, and the wider crypto space offers a human-first example of interoperability. With practices that bridge traditional and digital worlds, Paper Buddha and The Temple demonstrate how digital art can thrive when collaboration and mindfulness lead the way.

This Airbnb was only one node of a much larger network. The Temple extends far beyond this core group, and over time I hope to spotlight the many contributors shaping its broader ecosystem. Even within this first experience, it became clear I was witnessing something rare: a sustainable, grassroots model for how multidisciplinary artists can survive and thrive in an evolving digital landscape.

That matters, because Miami Art Week is not forgiving. Arrive alone, overzealous, underprepared, or chasing opportunity instead of community, and burnout comes fast. The internet flattens reality, turning complex ecosystems into highlight reels and comparisons that are only half true. Community here is not a luxury. It is the difference between being consumed and being carried forward. Traveling with The Temple made all the difference. Their website is a great place to learn more, here.

Tezos in the Wild

This trip marked the first time I found myself openly representing Tezos inside an event culture still largely shaped by traditional art, Ethereum and broader Web3 norms. In fact, there was not a lot of Tezos presence beyond our group and a few cross-chain artists being exhibited within larger curations. Tezos energy was still in the air though. Paper Buddha and I were blessed with an invite to the FA2 Fellowship brunch, where I finally got to meet the legendary Alexandra Paris among several other prominent Tezos figures that had me feeling star struck. See a glimpse of that moment and tags for everyone who attended here.

The biggest Tezos moment during the trip however, was during Miami Vibes After Dark, an event by The Temple at The Gates Hotel. Tezos art took over the rooftop through large-scale projections visible from the street below. Cars idling in traffic on their way to Art Basel’s main halls suddenly had something unexpected to look at. Pedestrians slowed down, phones came out, and conversations sparked. For an entire afternoon into the night, Tezos art lived on the side of a building during one of the busiest art weeks of the year. I even performed a short live set of acoustic music, projecting my heartstrong songs into the Miami airwaves with professional sound design and flute solo by Attabotty. The art being exhibited can be found in a dedicated collection on Objkt, here. See a glimpse of the event, here.

That visibility and frequency mattered.

Documentation from the exhibit has already begun circulating, and more footage is still being edited as I write this. I will continue sharing the archive as it becomes available. What stood out most was how naturally the work existed in the environment. It did not ask for attention. It earned it.

The response from The Gates Hotel and its partners reinforced that feeling. They invited the group back on Sunday for a bonus night of exhibiting Tezos art to all of Miami as they passed, extending the activation through the final day of Art Basel and Miami Art Week. Between the outdoor projections and the One Love Art DAO exhibition inside the hotel throughout the week, the space evolved into a living tapestry that orbited Art Basel rather than competing with it.

The atmosphere at The Gates struck a rare balance. Luxurious, yet genuinely welcoming. It created room for real conversation. I spent time face to face with exhibiting artists in the lobby, on the rooftop, and in quiet corners where discussions about the future of art unfolded naturally. I spoke with builders, brand strategists, and event planners, absorbing their perspectives while sharing my own experiences as an artist minting on Tezos. I listened as cross-chain creators explained why Tezos still feels like a home base, even as they experiment elsewhere. I also witnessed three artists mint their first works on Tezos during the week.

This was not an official Tezos activation. There was no loud branding and no prescribed talking points. That was precisely what made it powerful. Artists showed up. The work spoke for itself. The community carried the energy forward. People were entertained. Art was sold. And meaningful connections were formed in a way that felt honest and lasting. Catch up on what happened with the One Love Art Dao exhibit here.

Cross-Chain Conversations

Living with The Temple meant conversation never really stopped. ETH mechanics over breakfast. Tezos philosophy on the couch. Long talks late at night about burnout, sustainability, and the shift away from speculation-driven culture back toward the art itself.

One idea kept resurfacing.

Blockchain should function like a railroad. Reliable. Invisible. Moving the work forward without demanding attention.

Artists do not want to lead with infrastructure. They want to talk about intent, process, and meaning. I noticed that when I used shared crypto language rather than Tezos-specific terminology, conversations opened more easily. Trust formed faster. Meeting people where they already are proved more effective than pulling them into branded vocabulary like baking, for example. Once the human connection was there, deeper technical discussions followed naturally. People are genuinely interested in what you have to show them, if you don’t act like what they are passionate about is less important. I found that most everyone was doing significant work for the web3 space, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the pilgrimage to Art Basel.

This mirrored how Miami Art Week itself functions. Art Basel sits at the center, dense and gravitational, while an entire ecosystem of satellite events orbits around it. Some operate close to the core, others further out, but all are shaped by the same pull. The Gates Hotel, One Love DAO, house shows, pop-ups, and late-night gatherings were not competing with Art Basel. They were creating space where culture could breathe while orbiting and contributing to the Miami and Art Basel story.

The same logic applies to chains and communities. Tezos does not need to replace what sits at the center. It can remain a stable, artist-first orbit where creators return to experiment, recover, and build sustainably while still engaging the broader ecosystem.

I also gained clarity around “pay-to-play” exhibitions. Some offer real value and care. Others feel extractive. MykNash paid a modest fee to exhibit with One Love DAO and left with meaningful sales and glowing feedback. At the same time, some Art Basel booths cost well into six figures. Both models exist for a reason. Both make sense in specific contexts. Knowing when and why each one works is now part of being a professional artist and the risks involved with climbing the ranks.

One common theme I took away was that those who have climbed the ranks and sit at the center of the Art Basel spotlight are just people. Artists just like me, who have put in the work and contributed enough blood, sweat, and tears to manage those expensive booths and high expectations from fans they’ve earned and kept along the way.

Performances, Parties, and Collisions

Friday night became one of the highlights of the week. Music and vocal performance BYHAZE, vibrant DJ sets, and a closing set of acoustic songs by me, with sound design and accompanying flute by Attabotty. The energy felt warm, open, and present the entire evening.

Across the street, Ja Rule was serving drinks behind a bar and many people wandered in while passing, getting their first time exposure to digital art. These collisions are apparently normal during Basel, but they still feel surreal when you are witnessing them in person.

Throughout the week, I spent time with Miami promoters, NFT event planners, web3 lawyers, non-profits, and founders across ecosystems. Every conversation became either a future collaboration, a potential article, or a clearer understanding of how this space actually functions beyond timelines, X spaces, and hype. It became clear that the network effect happening in digital art is stronger than any charts. We just need to keep being open to collaboration, and entertaining the people so that they will keep showing up in larger numbers.

The Collector’s World

On Sunday, I gained access to the UBS VIP collector lounge and brought several Tezos artists with me. The shift in atmosphere was immediate. The space was quiet, measured, and meticulously composed, far removed from the kinetic energy of satellite events. Multi-million-dollar traditional works sat comfortably in pristine rooms, accompanied by curated catering, an open bar, and staff anticipating every need. I posted in the middle of my astonishment, here.

What stood out just as quickly was what was missing.

There was no digital art on display.

This was not framed as rejection. Large digital screens were already in place, looping high-resolution footage of painters at work. The technology was there. The willingness to use it was clear. And yet, the screens stopped short of showing digital art itself.

That absence did not feel discouraging. It felt like an open door.

Walking those halls tailored to high end clients and collectors made it easier to imagine how digital art could exist naturally in these environments as an extension. Provenance, scarcity, storytelling, and cultural relevance are shared values. What is missing is not alignment, but translation. After all, right outside the doors of the lounge was the zero10 section. UBS and digital art were literally neighbors at Art Basel.

After seeing that space firsthand, the idea of Tezos acting as a bridge between digital creators and traditional collectors felt tangible. Not by forcing entry, but by meeting institutions where they already are, with language and presentation that respect their refined needs. For example, the formal governance and forkless amendability of the Tezos protocol, and how that can preserve the scarcity of NFT assets. Not an easy task to translate, but it must be possible.

The gap I witnessed was not a wall. It was a pause, and pauses are often where the next chapter begins. It takes presence and clarity if we want to be part of the next chapter, in the eyes of Art Basel and traditional art. The presence is strong, next we need to clarify the benefit.

What I’m Bringing Back to Tezos

The most important lesson of the week did not come from a panel or exhibition. It came from watching The Temple operate. Their collaboration model, mutual support, daily rhythm, and belief in one another felt like a blueprint worth protecting and an example of the benefits that come as a result of strong web3 enabled communities. For example, witness Atta minting his genesis NFT on Tezos with support from all of us, here.

Tezos does not need to imitate the loudest ecosystems. Its strength lies in supporting communities that move with authenticity rather than scale. Spending a week embedded with The Temple clarified how powerful that cultural foundation can be. It reinforced the importance of supporting the emerging and active. Those that are present, not only the profitable.

I left Miami tired, and sad, but inspired and carrying pages of notes. Several artists I met are natural fits for future features on Artz Friday spaces and ‘ART’icles. Others expressed interest in minting on Tezos after seeing how the community shows up. More people now understand that Tezos is not a ghost chain, but a living network of artists, builders, and collaborators. One real life connection at a time we can remain a significant part of the bigger picture.

Before Heading Home

Art Basel can swallow you if you are not grounded. Traveling with The Temple kept me anchored. There was purpose in every movement. Observation balanced contribution. Learning never stopped.

The road eventually turned back home, but the orbit continued. I returned carrying stories, relationships, and a sense of responsibility to maintain momentum. This trip reset something in me. It rekindled the spark I felt after my first TezCon, magnified. The sense that Tezos is carving out a meaningful place in the broader Web3 story. Not through hype. Through people. Through community. Through art.

But we can’t stop now. This week, I attempt to recap events, but it’s only a blip in a larger novel being written. It’s a reminder of why I do this work and why I will keep showing up, listening, and writing to try and help make sense of it all. Together, we can form a clear path forward.

Art Basel 2025: The Temple Edition was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello Tezos community! As December settles in and the year begins its final stretch, this week arrives with the kind of quiet momentum that reminds us why Tezos continues to feel steady, focused, and forward-leaning. The past few days brought meaningful updates across privacy, governance, and real-world adoption, and each one tells its own part of the larger story that has been unfolding all year.

We start with a feature many people have been waiting for. Umami has officially switched on shielded transactions, giving Tezos users a simple way to send funds privately without changing how they interact with the network. It is practical, thoughtful, and very Tezos in spirit.

Meanwhile, governance keeps its rhythm. Tallinn just crossed quorum with strong participation and unanimous support, placing it one step closer to activation. With the cooldown period approaching, the community is already looking ahead at what this upgrade unlocks in the months to come.

And beyond protocol work, Tezos continues to show up in the world in ways that feel both surprising and absolutely logical. Lyzi just enabled crypto payments at Porsche and Lamborghini dealerships across Europe. Arthur Breitman delivered another deep and wide-ranging interview, this time on the CryptoNews Podcast. And the ecosystem saw more signs of growth through new tools, new conversations, and new integrations.

It feels like the kind of week where all the pieces line up and point toward a very clear direction.

Let’s get into it.

Shielded Transactions Arrive on Umami Wallet

This week brings a major quality-of-life upgrade for anyone who prefers a little more discretion when moving funds on Tezos. After months of tinkering, testing, and quietly hinting at what was coming, Umami Wallet has rolled out shielded transactions, giving users a private way to move tez while staying fully native to the network.

On most blockchains, every transfer is visible: amounts, addresses, movements, all laid out in the open. Umami’s new shielding flow switches that model entirely. Powered by Sapling, the same cryptographic protocol first developed by the Zcash team and fully integrated into Tezos, users can now send tez in a way that keeps transaction details confidential and decide exactly who can view them.

The feature fits naturally into Umami’s clean, minimal interface. There are no complicated settings to configure and no obscure steps to memorize. You shield your tez, you send it, and the wallet handles the rest. It’s the kind of simple, thoughtful addition that makes a difference without adding friction.

For Tezos users who want a wallet that balances strong UX with powerful features under the hood, this is a meaningful move forward. Privacy on Tezos has always been available at the protocol level, but giving people a straightforward way to use it in everyday transactions is how it becomes part of the ecosystem’s rhythm.

You can try shielded transactions now on Umami.

Tallinn Hits Quorum and Moves Forward

Coming off the excitement of seeing privacy finally arrive in a clean, intuitive way through Umami's new shielded transactions, it feels fitting to shift our attention back to the foundation that makes these kinds of upgrades possible in the first place. Tezos governance has been quietly moving through its next chapter, and the results this week were impossible to miss.

Momentum around the twentieth Tezos protocol upgrade continues to build. After clearing the proposal phase with ease, Tallinn entered the Exploration Vote this week and immediately surged past every required threshold. Participation has now exceeded 56 percent, comfortably above the quorum target, and the supermajority stands at a full 100 percent.

With those numbers locked in, Tallinn is set to advance to the next step of the governance cycle. In one day, the proposal transitions into the cooldown period before heading toward the Promotion Vote.

If adopted, Tallinn introduces key upgrades that tighten performance on Layer 1, improve security through full baker participation in attestations once tz4 adoption is high enough, and deliver a leaner storage model through the new Address Indexing Registry. It represents another step toward the broader Tezos X roadmap and the kind of technical refinements that make a noticeable difference for builders and users.

For now, it is encouraging to see validators showing such clear alignment. Bakers who have not yet participated can still submit their ballots as the vote remains open until the phase closes.

As always, you can follow the progress and voting activity live on Tezos Agora.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Tezos-Based Lyzi Brings Crypto Payments to Porsche and Lamborghini

After a week where governance progress and protocol engineering took center stage, it feels refreshing to shift over to something that shows Tezos’ impact in a much more visible, everyday way. Not everyone reads changelogs or follows quorum dashboards, but everyone understands what it means when a technology suddenly becomes part of a luxury purchase experience. And this week, Tezos quietly found its way into exactly that moment.

French fintech Lyzi, built on Tezos, has expanded its reach across Europe in a way that turns heads even outside crypto circles. Two major luxury car dealerships, Porsche Centre Montpellier, and Lamborghini Bordeaux, now accept cryptocurrency payments directly through Lyzi. Customers can walk in and purchase a vehicle using tez, bitcoin, stablecoins like EURC and USDC, or any of the eighty supported assets.

Dealerships receive instant euro conversion with no exposure to price swings, while customers enjoy a clean wallet-based checkout. That combination of simplicity, speed, and compliance is exactly what real-world payments need if they’re going to scale beyond niche use cases.

Lyzi’s momentum doesn’t stop with luxury vehicles. The company is also partnering with Doctors of the World, enabling crypto donations for humanitarian programs across more than eighty countries. With a regulated EU environment in place, the organization sees crypto as a new channel for global fundraising, a way to reach donors in places where traditional payment rails come with friction or barriers.

Built on Tezos, Lyzi now connects to more than one million payment terminals throughout Europe, and the list of partners keeps growing. From high-end retailers to Monaco hospitality groups, the network is quietly stitching together a modern payments layer powered by fast settlement and security guarantees that matter for institutions.

As Nomadic Labs’ David Relkin put it, “By building on Tezos, Lyzi ensures users benefit from rapid settlement and best-in-class security.” It is one thing to talk about sovereign financial rails in theory; it is something else to see them touching both luxury commerce and humanitarian relief in the same week.

Lyzi plans to expand further in 2026, and if this trajectory holds, Tezos-backed payments are going to show up in more everyday contexts than most people expect.

Arthur Breitman on CryptoNews: A Wide-Angle Look at Tezos, Security, and the Future of Blockchains

After watching Tezos show up in the real world through payments, gaming, and governance, this week also brought a deeper look at the ideas guiding the ecosystem forward. Arthur Breitman sat down for a new episode of the CryptoNews Podcast, and the conversation covers more ground than almost any recent interview of his.

The episode begins with tokenized uranium and why bringing meaningful, hard-to-access assets on-chain creates far more value than the usual tokenized treasuries. Arthur also unpacks the real implications of quantum computing for Bitcoin, and why proof of stake holds up as the most balanced consensus model for long-term security.

The interview moves from technical reality to community culture. Arthur reflects on how Tezos became known as a home for artists, and why that reputation was earned through consistent behavior and not marketing. He also highlights what makes Tezos rare in this industry. The network has completed 19 upgrades without a hard fork, which gives developers and users a reliable foundation that still evolves at a steady pace.

Other topics include Tezos’ EVM layer, how the Data Availability Layer fits into the long-term architecture, and the broader vision for a modular ecosystem that is both flexible and durable.

It is a thoughtful conversation that captures why Tezos continues to be shaped by both engineering rigor and creative ambition.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

🔴 Now Streaming: When AI Meets Ownership | How Sogni and Tezos Are Giving Creativity Back to People

This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu welcomes Mauvis Ledford, CEO and Co-Founder of Sogni, the creative AI platform working to rebalance the relationship between creators and machine intelligence. Mauvis joins us to talk about Sogni’s early momentum, its roots in the Fortify Labs Startup Studio, and why Tezos and now Etherlink have become home for their mission.

Our guest is Mauvis Ledford, artist, technologist, and co-founder of Sogni, where he leads a team building an AI platform grounded in fairness, transparency, and meaningful creative agency.

🔍 In this episode, we explore:

What inspired the creation of Sogni and the artistic background that shaped its vision

Why Tezos and Etherlink were natural choices for a responsible, creator-centric AI platform

How Fortify Labs helped turn an idea into a full product ready for market

What it felt like to launch Sogni and watch its community grow past 80,000 users

How Sogni’s supernet works — and how anyone can participate by sharing idle compute

The role of Sogni tokens and how they support a fairer creative economy

Why alternatives to centralized AI systems are urgently needed

The most important philosophical questions facing AI in 2025

How AI and Tezos can shape the future of artistic expression

What’s ahead for Sogni as it moves into 2026

Watch the full episode on YouTube.

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Interesting finds and insights for the future and how Tezos is ahead of the game.

DevConnect Argentina is a rare kind of gathering in the crypto space. It’s not a traditional conference built around announcements or marketing, it’s a week where builders, researchers, and protocol thinkers meet to compare notes and pressure test the direction of the entire Ethereum ecosystem. Being here gives you a real sense of where the industry thinks it’s heading, what challenges matter most, and what trade offs different communities are willing to make.

Even as a Tezos supporter, the value of this event is obvious. These environments allow you to take the pulse of the broader ecosystem and see where Tezos stands in relation to others. And to my surprise (or maybe not) the gap is becoming hard to ignore. Much of what’s being presented during the event as forward looking research for Ethereum is already live, tested, and proven on Tezos. I’ll dive deeper into all of this, so stay with me. There’s a lot to unpack, why Argentina has become such fertile ground for crypto, the renewed push toward coherent L1s, privacy finally making its way back into the conversation, Etherlink stepping up as a Pragma sponsor, and the Tezos side events that gave DevConnect its own special cultural energy.

Argentina: A Crypto-Friendly Frontier

While many blockchain events happen in familiar tech hubs (San Francisco, London, Singapore), DevConnect coming to Buenos Aires is symbolic. Argentina is not just a backdrop, it’s a live laboratory for crypto use cases, structural experimentation, and grassroots adoption.

Socioeconomic context: With persistent inflation, capital controls, and currency devaluations, Argentina has been fertile ground for crypto and stable coins usage for years. The population is already familiar with digital assets as tools of financial resilience, not just speculation.

Regulatory openness: Argentina has become one of the most pragmatic environments for crypto in the region, and Lemon Cash App is the best example of that openness. Clear tax rules, legal recognition of crypto, and the freedom to operate with stable coins allowed Lemon to launch crypto linked Visa cards and integrate smoothly with the traditional banking system. Regulatory sandboxes and a generally permissive stance toward innovation created a space where Lemon and many others could grow quickly without facing the usual barriers seen in other countries, even in the region.

Use case momentum: In Argentina, you can see real world crypto use beyond pure trading. From remittances, on-chain payments in retail and services, to tokenization of real assets (agri-commodities, real estate) and local defi experimentation. This means builders are not starting from scratch, they’re building in a region with existing demand and pain points.

Talent & innovation pool: Buenos Aires hosts a vibrant tech ecosystem, strong software talent, open to crypto and web3. Hosting DevConnect here means access to builders who understand local constraints and can iterate quickly, often under pressure unlike pristine Silicon Valley conditions.

Strategic timing: The fact that DevConnect selected Argentina now signals two things: a recognition that the “next frontier” lies in regions where crypto matters on the ground, and an opportunity for participants to engage with fresh perspectives and use cases that may become mainstream in other markets only later.

The Return to Coherent L1s: Watching Ethereum Move Toward Tezos X’ Path

From the very first day, one theme stood out: Ethereum is slowly pulling back from its L2 centric narrative (the fragmented version) and returning to the reality that the L1 must be strong, coherent, and efficient. Fragmentation, uneven security guarantees, and the complexity of relying on dozens of independent L2s are forcing a recalibration. This shift highlights something we’ve known for years in Tezos: a unified chain with native scaling, coordinated upgrades, and protocol level innovation avoids many of these structural problems from the start. Just to be clear, I don’t have an issue with L2s themselves. I only call them out when they stop being real L1 extensions and turn into separate islands with multisig control or their own token, splitting the ecosystem instead of keeping it unified.

Sitting in that room, it was impossible not to feel that Tezos chose the right approach to scaling early on: coherent, integrated, and built directly into the L1 protocol (Tezos X). DevConnect Argentina makes one thing clear: the future of scaling is moving toward ideas Tezos embraced years ago, and that put a smile on my face.

The Comeback of Cypherpunk Principles

One of the most refreshing undercurrents at DevConnect was the quiet but unmistakable return of privacy as a serious pillar of the ecosystem. For years it felt like the industry had drifted away from its cypherpunk roots, trading the original idea of user autonomy for convenience, hype, or regulator-pleasing compromises. This time, though, the mood was different. You could feel that people are finally acknowledging what many of us already knew: without strong privacy, the entire promise of crypto becomes fragile. New protocols, revamped primitives, and even big players were openly embracing the need to rebuild privacy into the foundations rather than bolting it on as an afterthought.

And of course, it was impossible not to think of Tezos in that context. The ecosystem didn’t wake up to privacy because it suddenly became fashionable, it introduced Sapling (Privacy Protocol) years ago, back when most chains were still debating whether privacy was even desirable. Today it continues to support that direction with initiatives like shieldbridge, pushing for practical, user-facing privacy tools instead of theoretical promises. Seeing the broader industry finally walk toward the direction Tezos committed to long ago felt like a welcome alignment. After being a lonely topic for quite some time, privacy is now back on the table, openly discussed, explored, and pushed forward. DevConnect made it clear that the space is circling back to the ideals that started all of this, and honestly, it was good to see the room finally catching up.

Etherlink Makes Its Mark as a Pragma Sponsor

Pragma at DevConnect brought together builders, researchers, and protocol teams for a day focused entirely on the technical side of EVM-aligned development. It wasn’t a hype event; it was a room full of people discussing rollup architectures, MEV, account abstraction, modular execution, cross-chain design, and the next wave of infrastructure that will carry the ecosystem forward. The tone was practical and engineering-driven, making it one of the most valuable stops during the week for anyone working on core tech.

Etherlink played a notable role as one of the sponsors, positioning itself clearly in front of an audience that cares about robust execution environments and credible neutrality. Several members of the Tezos Core Development group were on the ground as well, spending the day networking, answering questions, and helping teams understand how to build on Etherlink. Their presence wasn’t just symbolic, they were actively facilitating conversations around tooling, performance, interoperability, and real use cases that can benefit from Etherlink’s architecture.

Tezos side events at DevConnect Argentina

During DevConnect Argentina, two vibrant Tezos hosted gatherings showcased both the community’s collaborative spirit and its commitment to art. The Tezos Breakfast Club invited DevConnect participants to Café Nómada in Villa Crespo on 21 November. It was designed as an informal morning meetup featuring coffee, pastries, and networking. In Buenos Aires, this edition celebrated the creative energy emerging from Latin America by bringing together builders, artists, and innovators who are experimenting with Tezos. It aimed to connect local builders and curators, share stories from Tezos initiatives in the region and highlight how Tezos nurtures a sustainable, human centered blockchain culture. The relaxed atmosphere of conversation and croissants provided a welcoming start to the day, and the meetup was hosted by the Tezos Trailblazers Bosque Gracias, Lucasoxx who is part of Newtro Arts team.

The Art on Tezos: Buenos Aires gathering, held as a one‑day satellite event during DevConnect, was a pop up exhibition that celebrated a thriving network of artists and technologists building culture within the Tezos ecosystem. Visitors stepped into a space alive with creativity, conversation and connection, complete with projections, glowing installations, multimedia displays, food and drinks. The curatorial concept revolved around “artists curating artists” members of the Newtro collective each selected additional Tezos ecosystem artists, creating a network of works from different times, paths and contexts. This approach symbolised a living tree, whose roots represent the underground networks of collaboration and care. The event, underscored the collective’s mission to promote digital art across Latin America through workshops that have onboarded hundreds of artists to blockchain creativity.

Both events benefited from the broader ecosystem’s support. Tezos Trailblazers organised the Breakfast Club, while Newtro Arts curated the art exhibition. Together, the Breakfast Club and Art on Tezos showcase how Tezos aligned groups, and the ecosystem in general bring together global artists, builders and collectors under one roof, sharing a passion for art, culture, and blockchain innovation.

Being there was incredible, I’ve followed the Art on Tezos scene online for a while, but watching it unfold in real life was something else entirely. The room had the same energy I’d sensed on the screen, only amplified, and the dedication from the artists and organizers blew me away. I left both the Breakfast Club and the exhibition feeling thankful and energized, knowing that what I’d seen online was the real deal. Huge thanks to Tezos Commons for giving me the opportunity to witness this community up close.

DevConnect Refocused: Back to L1 Strength, Unified Ecosystems, and Real Privacy

DevConnect felt like a reset. The industry is slowly waking up to the idea that strong L1s and unified ecosystems matter again, and privacy is finally being treated as a real building block rather than a secondary thing. Etherlink and several members of the Tezos teams were everywhere: Events, hackathons, side conversations, showing developers and people in general why Tezos’ design might be exactly what their projects need if they want real scalability without sacrificing security.

And in the middle of all this technical intensity, the Tezos Art events brought a completely different energy. The Tezos Breakfast and the Art on Tezos gathering reminded me that this ecosystem isn’t only about code; it’s also about people, creativity, and culture.

DevConnect Buenos Aires 2025 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Digital Art On Tezos Took Over Berlin and What That Means

The art movement on Tezos isn’t new. It has been forming for years, though the spotlight may have softened at times. Recent events in Berlin gave us a loud reminder of the momentum that never stopped. It was a chance to pause, reflect, and honor the story the community has been writing together. The art, the artists, and the people who care about the Tezos ecosystem continue to give the network its pulse.

Art On Tezos: Berlin carried that energy across four days of exhibitions, walk-throughs, conversations, and community moments making the ecosystem feel more visible than it has in a long time.

This was a collective effort, as most things in a decentralized ecosystem need to be. The scale of participation across artists, curators, platforms, organizers, and supporters made the week feel like the true shared heartbeat of Tezos. You could sense how much work had taken place behind the scenes, from planning calls and curation threads to X Spaces that kept people aligned in real time. It created a rhythm that carried into the recaps and social posts that followed once the event came to a close.

Catching Up On The Event

A trace of the moment gets captured in every fragment shared: the coverage, the threads, the recaps, the “buzz”. All together they form the clearest view of what this event represented, and the Art On Tezos X account, created in December 2024, has become one of the best sources for accumulating details and compiling the efforts that helped spread the word over the past several months.

Journalist write-ups laid the groundwork by giving structure to the event. Publications walked readers through the curations, the themes, and the gathering of artists who rarely share the same physical space. Independent blogs, artist essays, and local photo journals added the texture that only firsthand accounts can provide. These pieces captured moments like artists chatting beside their own work, visitors discovering new creators in real time, and curators explaining the thinking behind each gallery path. Crypto news outlets stepped in to highlight the significance of bringing so many blockchain-native artists together in Berlin, a city built on counterculture and creative expression. The Tezos social channels pulled the wider story into view through quick clips, artist showcases, behind-the-scenes snapshots, and steady bursts of community energy that helped the event feel present far beyond the venue walls. Each perspective added a different angle to the same truth. The Tezos arts community is still finding new ways to show its depth and range.

Discover more coverage of Art On Tezos: Berlin listed below, then keep reading as I reflect on what it all means.

Merzazine (Merzmensch)“Reunion with Friends (my very personal review)” Medium

Art-Magazine.ai Art on Tezos: Berlin event page art-magazine.ai

Crypto.News — “Sneak peek: blockchain meets contemporary art at Tezos Berlin” CryptoNews

Blockster — “Art on Tezos Berlin: 200+ Digital Artists Redefine Blockchain Creativity” CryptoNews

XHBT — Art on Tezos Berlin 2025 Exhibition (winner list and program) xhbt.org

A Trifecta Of Participation

Three guiding forces shaped the energy of the week: foundational support, builder support, and the heartbeat of the community. What stood out most was how naturally these layers worked together.

Tezos Foundation helped set the frame. Through promotion, communication, and the structure that tied the moving parts together, they gave the week a shared identity. It signaled that art on Tezos is not a passing spotlight. It is a long-term focus. A commitment that continues to mature. A nod to the he‘Art’ of Tezos.

TriliTech added momentum by planning and paving a path forward. Helping creative communities navigate tools, partnerships, and on-chain infrastructure. Hosting spaces to rally us all together, plus a presence in Berlin that made it easier to see how artists, developers, and institutions can share the same space with clarity. Not on separate tracks but connected paths.

Artists, developers, curators, local organizers, collectors, collectives, and curious newcomers assembled. The people who use Tezos every day filled the event with character and intention. Generative artists experimented with installation formats. Teia community members sparked conversations that encouraged innovation. Objkt galleries are flexing their full potential in physical exhibits. Curators mapped out shows that made the ecosystem feel whole. The community that couldn’t physically be there was represented through the art. All of it created a living reminder of how a decentralized community operates: not through hierarchy, but through collective participation.

How People Responded

Across the recaps, posts, and late-night conversations, a few emotions kept circulating.

There was relief. The relief of being in the same room again. Seeing friends who had only been usernames for years. Talking face-to-face without lag or delay. For a community that often meets in digital spaces, that shift into physical proximity can be grounding.

There was renewal. People left Berlin with a sense of forward motion. The event reaffirmed that experimentation is not slowing. Collaboration remains alive, exploratory, and playful in the best ways. You could sense a renewed belief in what artists can create together with Tezos as a unifying resource.

There was stability. The sense that the Tezos art ecosystem has grown in ways that are not always loud but absolutely real. Platforms have matured. Curators have sharpened their practices. Artists have found stronger voices. Foundations have strengthened. The progression has not been linear, but it has been shared. Berlin made that visible.

What Comes Next for Art On Tezos

During the long and drawn-out wait for god candles and financial freedom, expectations of the commonwealth have shifted. The floor has risen on what is possible and the paths being paved feel more natural. Tezos is like the old wise man who reminds you that the joy is in the journey, and the adventures are what we should look forward to, plan for, and cherish.

Events like Art On Tezos: Berlin prioritize the story over the outcome. In other words, the story of Art On Tezos is not finished. Instead of a single flagship gathering, Art On Tezos events may appear in multiple cities with strong creative pockets. Each would reflect the character of its local community while staying connected to the broader Tezos framework. Smaller scale, same spirit.

The first signs of this expansion are already visible. Newtro Arts hosted a satellite event on November 22, Art On Tezos: Buenos Aires. This offered a preview of what these distributed extensions can look like. It created an intimate setting where artists and collectors gathered for talks, walkthroughs, and reflections. It paired local flavor with global Tezos culture and showed how smaller groups can generate their own gravity while orbiting the same central idea. This format feels like a blueprint for what future Art On Tezos events could become.

Hybrid exhibitions will grow. Shows that treat tech as part of the art, not an invisible backend. Displays that update in real time. Interactive mints that become part of the experience. Visual proof layers that help visitors follow the lineage of a piece. These ideas are already forming. Berlin showed that it can be expanded.

Artist and developer residencies make sense, too. A format where creators build new work on site, with support from technical teams, then reveal the results at the end of each day. A live pipeline from concept to gallery. It shifts the focus from polished product to shared process, which aligns with what Tezos artists value.

All of these directions would offer the same momentum that Berlin created. A realization that our collective effort to tell the story of Art On Tezos matters.

The Real Life of Tezos

Visibility matters. When the community shows up in real life, the cultural foundation grows stronger. The work becomes easier to understand. The connections become more meaningful. That is my priority in this next chapter. It’s time to go live.

Steady livestreams, recaps from meetups, short interviews clipped for X or YouTube, any shared visual language that shows how people participate in the Tezos world beyond their screens. When these moments are documented, they create a living record of the community’s reality.

The Evolution Of The Tezos

Art On Tezos: Berlin was not a standalone moment. It was a marker. A reminder of what becomes possible when a network of people is aligned, when builders support the arts, and when communities operate with intention without waiting for permission.

The next step is simple and steady. Keep showing up. Keep documenting the reality and potential of Art on Tezos.

Art On Tezos: Reflections was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Expanding the Spotlight on Artists Of Tezos

Each month, the Tezos community continues to nominate creators for ‘ART’icle of the Month, and I use the wheel of names to pick five random artists to be spotlighted. Some artists get picked quickly. Others sit on the list for a long while, but the idea is that anyone making art on Tezos has a chance at being spotlighted, but only if the community keeps nominating the artists that inspire them. When you see art on Tezos that moves you, consider sharing it on X. Include the keyword “tezARTicle”. Tag the artist and know you are likely making someone’s day if you include why you are nominating them. I’ve experienced this as an artist firsthand, and it’s one of the motivators for creating this initiative.

November brings together our next set of artists whose names have been waiting, as they continue creating and steadily earning the attention they deserve. This month, we spotlight Alice On Neptune, Time, Marcela Bellini, Xeries Jame, and Kaiju. Their work covers everything from generative, glitch, painting, 3D, AI, and illustration. Each artist has a distinct voice and a committed presence on Tezos, and together they show how wide and active the creative landscape continues to be.

As always, this series exists to document the artists shaping the Tezos art community, highlighting their impact through the art they create. Let’s admire some more of the art that keeps Tezos so vibrant by taking a closer look at November’s featured artists.

Alice On Neptune: Intermedia Artist

Alice On Neptune is an artist whose practice moves between code, texture, sound, and poetic logic. Much of her work lives in the space where systems break open and reveal something unexpected. Alice approaches art as experimentation, discovery, and quiet world-building. Her work invites the viewer to slow down, observe the system in front of them, and consider what new forms might rise from the errors we often overlook. Utilizing the OBJKT collections, each exploration gets a dedicated home where we can experience the results together.

Within the collection “Excessive Landscapes”, Alice composes synthetic terrains by using light, data, and noise. In “The Tree and the Wayfarer” I see a traveller walking away from their favorite tree. The glitching above the tree might represent the noisy thoughts the traveller left behind, after reflecting to prepare for the journey ahead into the unknown. This artwork feels charged with passion and consideration.

A great taste of the wide artistic varieties of cuisine you can discover by visiting AliceOnNeptune’s linktree, here.

Time: Artist

Time creates with an instinctive hand. His work feels like emotion transferred straight to a surface, even when that surface exists in pixels. His catalog is vast, stretching from loose abstractions to detailed collaborative pieces, and choosing a single artwork to highlight was its own challenge. One thing stands out clearly. With nearly two thousand pieces minted on Tezos, his impact on the ecosystem is already undeniable and will likely grow even stronger in the years ahead.

In “Shock for the Culture”, the first impression is motion. Lines, patterns, and colors collide in a way that feels chaotic, almost overwhelming. But when you slow down and study the layers, a narrative begins to form. It mirrors the experience of navigating the internet, where a quick scroll often delivers moments meant to shock. Yet behind that noise is a larger pattern, a structure built on data that has become more valuable than most of us realize. Platforms profit from that story while users absorb the turbulence. Time captures that dynamic with clarity, leaving us to decide how long we want to stare into the blur.

So, take your time and discover more when ready, here.

Marcela Bellini: 2D & 3D Artist, Graphic Design, Impressionist

Marcela Bellini brings a sense of joy and playful exaggeration to the Tezos art landscape. Her work blends 2D and 3D techniques to transform familiar forms into something bright, glossy, and inviting. At the center of her practice is an ongoing exploration of inflated shapes and soft sculptural aesthetics that feel both imaginative and approachable.

Her signature “Puffy Icons” series captures this perfectly. These figures appear sculpted from polished vinyl or soft balloon material, brought to life through vibrant color and gentle humor. Even when Marcela draws from mythology, fantasy, or pop culture, the work stays grounded in a sense of lightness that makes it instantly engaging.

During the blind mint of Puffy Icons: genesis, the generative collection recently released on Objkt, I happened to mint a rare variant. Shortly after, Marcela reached out to congratulate me and offered a custom Puffy Icon. That personal touch, paired with the creativity behind the series, felt like the perfect moment to spotlight, so I’m showing off my custom Puffy Icon, “Blossom”, for this spotlight. A purrrfect example of how Marcela combines fun and creativity.

Discover more from Marcela Bellini, here.

Series Jame: Glitch, Digital Artist

Series Jame describes themself as “a humble and quiet person”, someone who doesn’t always claim the title of artist. Yet the work tells a different story. Across nearly 800 NFTs minted on Tezos, their creations show a wide range of digital art exploration. There are chaotic, color-heavy glitch works, quieter monochrome distortions, and moments of stillness through static illustration. Together, they form a world that feels instinctive and unpredictable, waiting to captivate those who discover the portfolio.

In the artwork titled “At the Cliff’s Edge with Souls”, we see a strong example of this balance. The piece brings together narrative, glitch, animated particles, and a careful interplay between color and empty space. As I sit with it, I find myself imagining being one of those drifting souls, standing at the end of life while something unseen pulls me towards the edge. If this were the moment I was offered before crossing into the unknown, I think I could accept it. To become part of an artwork would be a good ending.

Enjoy all of the creations by Series Jame by visiting their linktree, here.

Kaiju (Emotion Grapher): Illustration, Glitch, Monsters, Cute Cats

Kaiju, meaning “strange beast” in Japanese, is a subgenre of science fiction known for imaginative and often monstrous creatures. As an illustrator and glitch artist, Kaiju works across that full spectrum, moving from playful cat characters to more experimental and distorted creations, all threaded together with bold color and energy.

I chose “Hidan Cats” from the “cat cute” collection on Objkt because it captures that blend perfectly. The piece mixes glitch aesthetics with the kaiju spirit and the charm of Kaiju’s cat characters. The cat is styled after Hidan from the Naruto universe, and the details are remarkably committed. The markings on the face, body, and arms mirror the character so closely that you might wonder if this is a cat dressed as Hidan or Hidan reborn as a cat. A quick search for “Hidan” will show exactly how precise that portrayal is.

Discover all the hidden meaning and symbolism behind Kaiju’s art on Tezos, here.

Nominate Artists To Keep ‘ART’icle of The Month Going Strong

As we close out November’s spotlight, I want to circle back to what makes this series work. The artists featured each month are here because someone in the community took a moment to say, “Look at this. This moved me.” That simple act keeps the ecosystem alive. It keeps the wheel turning. It helps new collectors discover creators they may never have encountered otherwise.

If you want to support the artists shaping the Tezos landscape, keep sharing art you love, and keep the nominations flowing. When a piece catches your eye or pulls you into a feeling you did not expect, share it on X with the keyword “tezARTicle”. Tag the artist. Tell them why it hit you. Even a short message can spark encouragement, visibility, and momentum.

This initiative was born from that exact feeling. As an artist, I know how much those moments matter. As a writer documenting the culture around Tezos, I see how community attention can shift the entire arc of an artist’s journey.

So let’s continue lifting each other up. Let’s keep discovering. Let’s keep celebrating the creators who make this chain feel alive. November’s artists offered us new perspectives, new textures, and new emotional spaces to explore. December will bring another five. The wheel is ready. The list is waiting. Your nominations shape what comes next.

‘ART’icle of November 2025 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Month At A Glance — November 2025

A quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones within the Tezos ecosystem for November 2025.

Welcome to our latest issue, Month At A Glance (November 2025), where we give a quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones in the Tezos ecosystem on a monthly cadence.

November brought another steady wave of progress across the Tezos ecosystem, with protocol work advancing on both L1 and Etherlink, real-world asset conversations stepping into more institutional settings, and community activity continuing at a strong pace. From major upgrade proposals entering governance to new integrations, developer tools, and creative initiatives, the month showed how many parts of the ecosystem are moving forward in parallel.

Let’s break it all down.

Ecosystem Insights

Farfadet: Etherlink’s 6th upgrade proposal

Etherlink announced Farfadet, its sixth major kernel upgrade proposal, a package focused heavily on speed and responsiveness. If approved, Farfadet will introduce support for the Osaka EVM version, nearly double chain capacity from 14 Mgas/s to 27 Mgas/s, and enable near-instant transaction receipts via a new low-latency RPC method. The proposal keeps Etherlink’s EVM environment fast, modern, and closely aligned with upcoming Ethereum changes.

Alongside performance gains, Farfadet refines the developer experience with more consistent FA bridge events and important ModExp precompile changes aimed at strengthening security, even though they come with some breaking changes for projects close to the protocol surface. Node operators will also be expected to upgrade to the latest Octez EVM node once Farfadet hits testnet. The proposal is set to follow Etherlink’s slow-track governance timeline in early December, with full details available in the joint announcement from Nomadic Labs, TriliTech, and Functori, and the final outcome, in the hands of participating bakers.

Tallinn Protocol Upgrade Proposal Enters Governance

Last month, we noted that the next Tezos protocol upgrade, Tallinn, had been revealed. In November, things moved quickly: the proposal was formally announced, injected, and has already passed the Proposal phase. At the time of writing, it is preparing to enter the Exploration phase, where bakers will vote to determine whether it reaches quorum and continues through the governance cycle.

Tallinn brings a focused set of improvements aimed at smoothing developer workflows, strengthening the overall protocol, and preparing the ground for upcoming features in the Tezos X vision. Among its highlights are refinements to block validation rules, improvements to smart contract developer tooling, and further adjustments to the protocol environment to keep Tezos’ core L1 experience predictable and efficient.

With Tallinn now moving through the formal governance process, the coming weeks will determine whether it advances to the Promotion phase. Those interested in following the vote or reviewing the proposal details can find everything on Tezos Agora and the accompanying Nomadic Labs announcement, and as always, baker participation remains essential for keeping the upgrade process healthy and decentralized.

Arthur Breitman at the Philadelphia Fed’s Fintech Conference

Arthur Breitman spoke at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Fintech Conference, joining a panel on real-world asset tokenization alongside representatives from BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Ondo Finance, and leading academic institutions. The discussion brought builders and policymakers into the same room to examine how tokenized markets are maturing.

Arthur highlighted the growing recognition among U.S. regulators that public blockchains can broaden capital-market access and modernize outdated financial rails. He pointed to Uranium.io on Etherlink as a practical example of how tokenization can open markets that were previously inaccessible, rather than rewrapping assets that already have deep liquidity.

News From The Tezos Ecosystem: Quick Bits

Beyond those insights, the ecosystem saw plenty of other noteworthy developments worth a quick look:

Art on Tezos Hosts Berlin EventArt on Tezos held a dedicated community event in Berlin, bringing together collectors, artists, and builders for an evening of conversation, exhibitions, and creative exploration. The gathering helped strengthen local connections while spotlighting Tezos’ growing digital art scene. Photos and recaps from the event show strong participation and a thriving Tezos art community.

xU308 Integrates With Morpho via OkuTradeUranium.io’s tokenized uranium product, xU3O8, can now be used as collateral on Morpho through OkuTrade, opening the door to on-chain borrowing markets for real-world commodity exposure. The integration gives holders a new way to unlock liquidity without exiting their position, reinforcing Tezos’ growing footprint in the RWA space.

MoMI x Tezos FA2 Fellowship Kicks OffThe Museum of the Moving Image launched its new FA2 Fellowship on November 11, bringing together a cohort of artists exploring digital art, on-chain creativity, and experimental media on Tezos. The program includes workshops, mentorship, and hands-on creation inside MoMI’s media lab and will run through December 15, continuing the museum’s multi-year collaboration with the Tezos ecosystem. Early sessions are already underway, with public programming scheduled throughout the fellowship period.

ProtoTest v0.1 Released for Protocol DevelopersNomadic Labs introduced ProtoTest v0.1, a lightweight, dockerized tool that lets developers run Tezos protocol test suites locally without rebuilding Octez. It was created in response to community feedback asking for easier early-stage proposal testing and faster iteration during upgrade development. The announcement linked includes setup notes and guidance for anyone wanting to try it out.

Messari Publishes Tezos Q3 2025 Ecosystem ReportMessari released its “State of Tezos Q3 2025” report, a deep dive into network metrics, ecosystem growth, staking data, and emerging trends across Tezos. The report offers solid, data-backed insights that confirm continued activity and resilience in the network during a challenging broader crypto climate. For anyone tracking Tezos’ fundamentals, this one’s worth a thorough read.

Fortify Labs 2026 Applications Now OpenTzAPAC opened applications for the 2026 cohort of Fortify Labs, its accelerator-style program supporting teams building in the Tezos ecosystem. The initiative provides mentorship, funding opportunities, and hands-on guidance for early-stage projects across Web3, DeFi, gaming, and infrastructure. Interested teams can now apply through the official Fortify Labs portal.

Uranium.io Wins Innovation Award at Benzinga Fintech AwardsUranium.io received the Best New Product for Innovation in Crypto & Web3 award at the Benzinga Fintech Awards, a recognition of its pioneering work in tokenizing uranium through xU3O8 on Tezos and Etherlink. The project has gained increasing visibility this year as one of the ecosystem’s standout real-world asset initiatives.

MEXC & BitMart Add Support for XTZ on EtherlinkTwo major exchanges, MEXC and BitMart, added support for XTZ on Etherlink, making it easier for users to move assets directly into the EVM ecosystem on Tezos. The listings improve accessibility for developers and users exploring Etherlink-based applications, liquidity, and tooling. It’s another step toward broadening on-ramps for Tezos’ EVM layer.

GetBlock Adds Etherlink SupportGetBlock expanded its RPC infrastructure to include Etherlink, giving developers access to managed, scalable endpoints for building on Tezos’ EVM layer. With this integration, teams can plug into Etherlink without running their own nodes, simplifying development and deployment. The update further strengthens the growing tooling ecosystem around Etherlink.

Revolut Removes Fees on Tezos Delegation RewardsRevolut updated its crypto offering by eliminating all fees on Tezos delegation rewards, allowing users to receive 100% of the XTZ earned through the app’s auto-delegation feature. The change arrives shortly after Tezos’ Rio upgrade shifted reward payouts to a daily cadence, making the benefits more immediately visible for Revolut’s large user base. With XTZ among the few assets on the platform offering built-in earning functionality, the fee removal makes Tezos one of Revolut’s most attractive delegation options.

Chainlink Adds Support For EtherlinkChainlink announced support for Etherlink, bringing its industry-standard oracle infrastructure to Tezos’ EVM ecosystem. Developers can now access high-quality data feeds and services directly on Etherlink, opening the door to more robust DeFi, RWA, and automation use cases.

Events

Tuesday🎙Tezday w Wise Sigma Toad — November 4th

Artz Fridays w Desultor — November 7th

Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — November 11th

Artz Fridays w Nejo — November 14th

Tuesday🎙Tezday w Django Bits — November 18th

Artz Fridays w B_DWIL — November 21st

Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — November 25th

Artz Fridays November’s Community Call — November 28th

Stay in the Conversation, Stay in the Know

Tezos Commons hosts a variety of community-oriented events and content. From podcasts, X-spaces, and long-form content, there’s something for everyone.

TezTalks Live

TezTalks Radio

X Spaces

X Shorts

Baking Sheet Newsletter

In-Depth Articles

You can also contact us on X or via email at [email protected].

Month At A Glance — November 2025 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A practical guide to what it is, why it exists, and how it expands the staking model.

Tezos has always treated staking as a first-class citizen, simple for users, self-custodial by default, and tightly integrated into the protocol. But as the ecosystem grows and more activity moves through smart contracts, wallets, and now Etherlink, one practical limitation stands out:

You can only stake your tez when it stays inside your wallet.

That’s where liquid staking enters the picture, a model already proven on other chains like Ethereum with tokens such as stETH and rETH. On Tezos, the version of that idea is stXTZ.

I’ll keep things straightforward: this article isn’t about replacing the native staking model, it’s about understanding an optional tool that lets tez keep earning in places where it normally couldn’t.

Let’s start with the basics: what stXTZ actually is.

What is stXTZ

stXTZ is built by stacy.fi, a liquid-staking project developed by contributors from Ubinetic and governed through the youves DAO. It’s not a protocol-level feature, it’s an independent product that sits on top of Tezos, similar in spirit to how stETH sits on top of Ethereum. The goal is simple: give tez the flexibility that smart contracts and DeFi tools currently can’t.

At its core, stXTZ is a liquid representation of staked tez. Instead of rewards appearing as new tokens, the value of each stXTZ slowly increases over time, because it represents a share of a staking pool that grows as rewards come in. It’s a straightforward “one token = one share” model, where the share itself becomes more valuable as the pool earns.

Under the hood, the system is automated but not as complicated as you might think. A dedicated pool contract keeps track of the tez deposited into this pool and the amount of stXTZ minted against it. A cluster of Acurast-operated signers handles the day-to-day operations like staking, unstaking, and updating the pool, so everything runs without manual intervention.

The actual baking is done by a Tezos baker, currently Ubinetic, though the long-term goal is to expand this into a more decentralized, multi-baker architecture. As rewards come in, they are reflected back into the pool, which is what ultimately increases the value of each stXTZ.

In short, stXTZ is a share of a real staking pool backed by actual tez, supported by an automated infrastructure, and governed by the youves DAO.

Why We Need Something Like stXTZ

The real value of stXTZ shows up the moment your tez leaves your wallet. Native staking only works when the tez stays under your direct control, which means anything that relies on smart contracts like lending, AMMs, vaults, rollups, and automated strategies, simply can’t participate in staking rewards. stXTZ fills that gap.

Because it’s a regular FA2 token, it can move through the ecosystem without losing its connection to the staking pool. If a contract can handle any other token, it can handle stXTZ. And that unlocks a long list of practical use cases.

For one, it lets DeFi protocols on Tezos and Etherlink finally hold a yield-bearing version of tez. Lending markets can use it as collateral. AMMs can pair it with other assets. Strategies can loop it, hedge it, or structure around it. Every time stXTZ moves through these systems, it keeps earning staking rewards in the background, which is something plain tez simply cannot do once deposited into a contract.

Then there’s the NFT angle, which is honestly another really interesting one. Artists usually delegate instead of staking because they need liquidity to manage listings, bids, auctions, and collect. Marketplaces like objkt could integrate stXTZ directly, letting artists and collectors keep earning while staying fully liquid. Imagine placing a bid or an offer in stXTZ and watching its underlying value slowly grow while it sits there. It’s a small change, but it completely flips the idea of “idle funds” in marketplaces.

And the cumulative effect of all this is meaningful for Tezos itself. Every time someone chooses stXTZ instead of letting their tez sit inactive inside a contract or marketplace, a bit more tez ends up staked behind the scenes. Over time, that naturally pushes the global staking ratio higher, not by asking users to lock more, but simply by letting everyday activity contribute to staking in ways it couldn’t before.

How Do You Get stXTZ?

So, after all that, the obvious question is: how do you actually get stXTZ?Thankfully, the process is simple, and you’ve got two clean paths depending on what you prefer.

The most straightforward way is through stacy.fi itself. You connect your Tezos wallet, choose how much tez you want to convert, and the platform mints stXTZ for you on the spot. Your tez is added to the staking pool behind the scenes, but from your perspective, it’s a quick swap, tez goes in, stXTZ comes out, with no waiting period and no extra steps.

The other option is to pick some up directly on a DEX. Because stXTZ is just a normal FA2 token, you can trade on places like 3route or on the Etherlink DEXs if you’re already operating there. This route is especially convenient if you’re not swapping big amounts that will have a lot of slippage or if you want to avoid extra steps like bridging them to Etherlink.

Returning to tez is equally flexible. You can burn your stXTZ on stacy.fi and wait through Tezos’ normal unstaking period, or you can swap back instantly on a DEX if liquidity is available and you prefer speed over waiting. Either way, you keep full control of the asset at every step.

Risks and Looking Ahead

Besides the usual smart-contract risks that come with any on-chain project, the main thing to understand with stXTZ is slashing. Since stXTZ is backed by a real baker, a slashing event on the baker would reduce the pool’s balance, and that loss would be reflected in the value of each stXTZ. It’s rare on Tezos, but it’s the core risk behind every liquid-staking model.

That said, this is also the area where most of the future thinking is happening. The team has already talked about moving toward a multi-baker setup, where multiple bakers participate and bring their own stake as insurance. This spreads responsibility, reduces concentration, and weakens the impact a single baker can have on the pool.

Another idea the team has been exploring is an insurance-style buffer, a small reserve funded by redirecting a tiny portion of staking rewards into a separate pool. Over time, that reserve could build up enough to absorb part of a slashing event, or in some cases even cover the whole loss before it reaches stXTZ holders. It doesn’t remove the risk entirely, but it can meaningfully soften it.

The team also intends to introduce governance participation in the future. Because stXTZ represents real staked tez, the long-term idea is for the baking setup behind stXTZ to take part in protocol voting as well. The exact mechanics will depend on how the multi-baker architecture evolves, but the intention is clear: stXTZ shouldn’t only earn rewards, it should eventually be able to vote too.

At the end of the day, stXTZ isn’t trying to replace native staking. It simply adds a missing layer of flexibility, letting tez stay productive even when it’s being used. As Tezos continues to grow across L1 and Etherlink, that kind of optionality becomes more and more valuable.

If you haven’t looked at stacy.fi yet, it’s worth keeping on your radar. Tools like this tend to start quietly, and then, before you know it, they’re everywhere.

The Case for stXTZ was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tezos Community Rewards — October 2025

Announcing the CRP Winners for October 2025!

Greetings Tezos Community,

We are pleased to announce the winners of the “Community Rewards Program” CRP for the month of October 2025!

For more details about the various categories, please refer to the rewards page on the Tezos Commons website.

The Community Rewards Program is a Tezos Commons Foundation initiative aimed at fostering adoption and supporting the Tezos ecosystem. Every month up to 5,000 tez are rewarded to those that stand out in merit and act in the interest of the Tezos ecosystem as a whole.

In an endeavor to make it easier for community members to nominate their favorite contributors to the ecosystem, the nomination form has been drastically streamlined. Now containing only three questions, it takes less than 30 seconds to submit a nomination.

Don’t have 30 seconds? You can tag any Discord message, Reddit post or tweet with #TezosCRP and we will collect them as well!

This is the fifth iteration of the program, and we will continue to make changes based on community feedback. Just like the Tezos blockchain, we will be continually evolving this program.

Numerous factors are used when evaluating submissions, such as quality of submissions, quality of activity, number of submissions, and verifiable proof of activity done by the nominee (no single factor is determinative of a winner, as all factors were weighed to select winners). The judges would like to note that for each category, they are looking for the respective monthly related activity, meaning submissions should reflect activities done for that current month, i.e.; month of October activities.

Without further delay here are the results of the winners, below.

Drill Sergeant Award

@paperbuddha

Helping Hand Award

@BosqueGracias

@AuRo404

@idjasaund

@_Gellefin

@TheTezos

Influencer Award

@HuemansUniverse

@_TransparentArt

@ZerorezeroA

@dexp0nential

@UnitedSaints

@Red_Alark_Pulse

Tez Dev Award

@AndrewKishino

@skllzarmy

@webidente

@retro_manni

@NFTBiker

Assimilation Award

@A_Rahaad

@tesserart_xyz

@MiRetratito

@voidformmeta

@HashSosaHash

@coralinesaidso

@pantea_pipar

Patissier Award

@fafo_lab

@blockbakery

@Zir0h

@nohardforks

@GroffFizix

@BakingBenjamins

Tezos Tutor Award

@spike_0124

@cletusEllijah

@malsheep56

@proto_designer

@TozartWeb3

Formal Verification Award

@ryangtanaka

TEO Award

@Xacoli_nft

@_joesimon

@uzzy_arts

Nominations Are Open For November

With November underway, we have begun accepting nominations for this month. If you know someone who deserves a reward for their contributions to the community or have ideas about other categories that should be recognized, then please fill out a nomination form located here, or you can tag a post (or discord message) with #TezosCRP.

As mentioned previously, we are still working on long-term improvements to this program. We know this program is far from perfect, so please bear with us while we strive to improve this program based on community feedback. Stay tuned, stay creative, and keep nominating!

As a reminder to the reward winners, the awards are all distributed through Kukai and DirectAuth. If you have issues claiming your awards, please message us here.

Tezos Community Rewards — October 2025 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Live Streaming The Digital Art Movement on Tezos

Art was the original form of communication. From carvings on cave walls and hieroglyphs in pyramids, down to the characters that compose the words of our modern languages, the literal foundation of life as we know it is thanks to artists inventing the means of expression. It’s also one of the unique factors of being human that no other known species has demonstrated, encouraging my theory that symbolic language played a factor in our evolution. My belief is that art is the most important thing to create, experience, and support if our species is to continue evolving.

However, a part of the formula that gave symbols the power to evolve our species has been by the very act of letting our art evolve into real-world utility. That isn’t a new crypto buzzword at all. Drawing and writing from a creative space, allowing our complex beings to physically express a thought or feeling, has always been the beginning of every invention. From geometry to math, and even code that created our modern digital era…Art is the foundation.

So, as we continue creating the world around us, how can artists pioneering the digital art era bring back the physical connection? I’ve written about meet-ups and events, but there is a step in between that builds trust and enables a larger audience to discover new and inspiring creations out there. It’s live streaming.

Presence in a Digital Age

We can post, text, and react instantly, yet we rarely see each other in live motion showing unfiltered emotion and character. With endless feeds and work calls filling every corner of the day, it becomes easy to mistake activity for presence, but presence is something we are still missing. It is a rhythm, a heartbeat, a reminder that someone is on the other side of the screen in real time. A look into the complex individuals we so often group into generalized stereotypes.

For the artists of Tezos, I believe going live can bring that presence back. Especially as a collective effort. It could bridge the gap between blockchain culture and the wider world in a way that words and posts cannot. It makes the space human again, potentially introducing more to the in between where trust is built. The formula that turns anon into a new friend in the community, maybe one you eventually meet at an event face-to-face.

The Realness Behind the Screen

For anyone outside the ecosystem, Tezos can seem abstract. Many still see crypto as charts and speculation, not a new and improved internet, creativity, or community. Yet if they were to sit in on a TezTones live match or listen to an Artz Friday session, they would quickly begin to understand the magic happening. The story here has never been about speculation and market movements. It is about people and what they build when enabled to do so. It is about heart, momentum, and shared imagination.

Live streaming brings that energy to the surface. Watching an artist sketch, paint, compose, prototype, or code in real time reveals the curiosity and care that drive creation. It shows the experiments, the hesitations, the breakthroughs. It is a glimpse into the process that no static post or short-form video edit can ever replicate.

Imagine the impact on learners out there. The ones who need to see something in action to understand it. A viewer scrolling through TikTok or Instagram might stumble upon a live stream where an artist creates, mints, and lists a piece right in front of them. Suddenly, the entire concept becomes real. Suddenly the missing link to adoption appears right on their screen.

What We Have Learned From Meeting in Person

In-person meet-ups like Marfa show us what happens when digital connections become physical. Artists, coders, collectors, and friends stepped into the same space and turned an isolated desert town into a cultural node. This same energy is carried into every live event from every corner and depth of the Tezos ecosystem. A room full of creators proves this is real, and what we are capable of when people gather with intention.

Going live is the digital reflection of those moments. It brings that in-person clarity into a format that anyone can enter from anywhere. A live stream shifts the conversation from theory to experience. It turns code into collaboration and pixels into presence. It reminds us that behind every contract and every mint is a person in motion with stories that can and will inspire us when given the proper exposure.

Value That Continues After the Stream Ends

The impact does not end when the stream cuts off. Every session becomes a source of ongoing value. Recordings can be edited into short clips for posts and reels. A single hour of creative work can fuel weeks of meaningful content that continues to reach new audiences long after the moment has passed. With many algorithms rewarding consistency, live streaming is an efficient way to build a backlog of short-form video content too.

These clips show authenticity. They show the ecosystem as it truly is. They reveal the passion and innovation that often go unseen behind the word crypto. Each fragment becomes an invitation for someone new to look closer.

Finding Balance

Most of us are trying to balance connection and rest. Friends and family messages stack up. Notifications fill the gaps between holidays and special occasions. There are times when unplugging feels like the only way to breathe. But going live is a different kind of presence. It is not another post to schedule or another feed to scroll. It is a shared moment that asks for nothing more than showing up as yourself.

This kind of presence keeps the ecosystem alive. It reminds us of why we create in the first place. I have found the most examples of this through my personal involvement in TezTones. These live matches showcase the best parts of Tezos artists and the benefits of the technology in art, unfiltered.

Show Them Your Tezos Experience

For every artist on Tezos, this is an open invitation. Go live. Whether it is on X, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, or any platform, the tool does not matter. What matters is giving people a window into your world. Show your workflow. Show your experiments. Share your questions and discoveries. Let people see what drives this digital art movement one real live moment at a time.

Each time you go live, you make this ecosystem more understandable to the outside world that otherwise struggles to find a clear view in. You show that it is not just technology. It is creativity, collaboration, and community. You bring the heartbeat of Tezos into the open world.

The more we show them how we live, the more they will understand why this matters, and grasp the benefits of joining us in this (still early) stage of the digital renaissance.

It’s Time To Go Live was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has been an eventful stretch for Tezos, with conversations unfolding everywhere from Philadelphia’s Federal Reserve Bank to the galleries of Paris. The network continues to show up in places where policy, culture, and infrastructure meet, and this week’s edition reflects that momentum in full.

We start with Arthur Breitman’s appearance at the Philadelphia Fed’s annual Fintech Conference, where he joined leaders from Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Ondo Finance, and top academic institutions to discuss the role of public chains in shaping real-world financial markets. It’s the kind of stage where the tone of future regulation is set, and Tezos had a clear voice in that conversation.

From there, we move into Paris Photo, where Tezos-linked artists and curators opened the week with a strong showing across exhibitions, prizes, and on-chain showcases. It has become one of the most visible moments of the year for the Tezos art community, and this year’s programming continued that tradition.

We also take a look at the launch of the MoMI x Tezos FA2 Fellowship, an educational program inviting artists to explore smart contract creation, and we close with ProtoTest, a new tool for protocol proposal developers that gives builders more power to test ideas locally.

Let’s get into this week’s Baking Sheet.

Arthur Breitman Speaks at the Philadelphia Fed’s Fintech Conference

Last week, we talked about Arthur Breitman’s appearance at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s annual Fintech Conference. This week, we get to look back at what was said on stage in a room full of policymakers, academics, and financial leaders.

Arthur joined leaders from BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Ondo Finance, and researchers from Wharton, Columbia, Cambridge, and Brookings for a panel on tokenizing real-world assets. It was a rare moment where policymakers and industry builders sat at the same table to talk about how on-chain markets are maturing.

His message was clear: U.S. regulators are beginning to recognize the value of public blockchains as tools for financial innovation and broader capital-market access. That shift in tone opens the door for use cases that have long sat outside the reach of traditional infrastructure.

Arthur pointed to uranium.io, built on Etherlink as an example of how tokenization can unlock markets that were previously closed to almost everyone. Instead of focusing on assets that already have dozens of venues, he encouraged the industry to look toward markets where access, settlement, and transparency are still stuck in decades-old structures.

“US regulators are warming up to the potential of public blockchains to foster financial innovation and expand capital markets. This will allow the industry to serve more meaningful and impactful use cases.”

Day two of the conference continues today, with more discussions centered on the future of on-chain finance and how public networks like Tezos can support the next wave of market structure upgrades.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Paris Photo Opens to the Public, and Tezos Takes Center Stage

After a week focused on institutional conversations in Philadelphia, the spotlight shifts to Paris where Paris Photo, one of the most important photography events in the world, has officially opened its doors. It’s a full week of exhibitions, talks, curations, and cross-disciplinary work and Tezos is woven straight into the heart of it.

This year, Artverse Paris is presenting a group show curated by Grida on objkt, bringing Tezos-native creators directly into the fair’s orbit. It lands at the same time as the announcement of the Art on Tezos Photography Prize winners, a competition that drew more than 300 submissions across nature, portraiture, urban photography, photorealistic AI, and experimental work.

Fifteen finalists emerged, each earning a spot in a dedicated exhibition at ArtVerse Gallery in the Marais district during Paris Photo week. Five category winners received 1,000 tez each, while ten runners-up received 500 tez, forming a prize pool that reflects Tezos’ ongoing support for photography as a serious artistic discipline.

The winning works range from macro wildlife photography to surreal synthetic interiors, from bold street life to elegant portraiture. Artists like Arijit Mondal, Srivatsan Sankaran, Nari Mazari, Marine Blehaut, and Jakub Kłak brought approaches that show how far on-chain photography has evolved since the early days of Hic Et Nunc.

The jury included voices from OpenAI, bitforms, Serpentine, and Right Click Save, giving the competition real artistic weight. Their selection process underscored what many Tezos creators already know: photography on Tezos hasn’t just grown, it has matured.

Each finalist was also invited to create a brand-new piece exclusively for the exhibition. These works will be minted on Tezos and displayed both IRL in Paris and on objkt, continuing the “URL to IRL” bridge that Artverse is known for.

With thousands of collectors, curators, and institutions moving through Paris Photo this week, the Tezos photography community finds itself exactly where it belongs — right in the middle of the conversation.

If you’re in Paris this week, you can join the community in person at the drinks reception and pop-up show on November 14:

🗓️ Nov 14⏰ 5:30–10:00 PM🔗 RSVP: https://luma.com/e4615yiu

With thousands of collectors, curators, and institutions moving through Paris Photo, the Tezos photography community finds itself exactly where it belongs, right in the middle of the conversation.

MoMI x Tezos FA2 Fellowship Begins

Paris Photo may be commanding global attention this week, but the momentum around Tezos and the arts is also growing in New York. The MoMI x Tezos FA2 Fellowship officially kicked off on November 12, opening its 2025–2026 cycle with a strong first session led by Beata and Regina.

The fellowship is open to anyone interested in exploring Tezos as both a creative environment and a tool for artistic expression. Over seven sessions running through May 2026, participants learn the foundations of FA2 smart contracts, experiment with blockchain as a medium, and develop their own projects with guidance from curators, artists, and technologists.

This week’s opening session introduced participants to the history of art on Tezos, how FA2 works under the hood, and how smart contracts can serve as building blocks for generative, interactive, or time-based work. The atmosphere was friendly, curious, and very much in the spirit of what has made Tezos a home for artists over the last four years.

Artists who complete at least four sessions will be eligible to apply for microgrants, offering additional support as they push their ideas further. One collaborative project will ultimately be selected for exhibition on MoMI’s media wall, giving participants a path from experimentation to public presentation.

Learn more about the fellowship and upcoming sessions:FA2 Fellowship: https://momixtezos.art/fa2-fellowshipMicrogrants: https://momixtezos.art/microgrants

The first session set a strong tone for what’s ahead. The next months will give emerging and established artists space to learn new tools, connect with peers, and build work that speaks to the possibilities of on-chain creativity.

ProtoTest v0.1: A New Tool for Protocol Proposal Developers

Wrapping this week’s news, the focus turns back to builders on the technical side of the Tezos ecosystem. This week, Nomadic Labs introduced something that many protocol developers have been asking for since the Quebec upgrade: a way to test proposals locally without wrestling with complex setups.

ProtoTest v0.1 is an experimental tool designed to make that possible. It packages key parts of the Octez suite into a dockerized environment, allowing developers to run the same protocol test suites used in Tezos’ GitLab pipeline directly on their own machines.

Repo: https://gitlab.com/nomadic-labs/prototest

The goal is simple. Developers can now:

Run existing protocol tests locally

Modify or extend those tests to fit the logic of their proposal

Reuse test suites from any version of Tezos as a baseline

This gives proposal authors a more realistic view of how changes behave across the protocol’s moving parts, long before community testing begins on public networks.

The hardware needs are the same as building Tezos from source, and Docker is required. Installation instructions are outlined in the repository, along with links to broader Octez documentation for those who want to understand how protocol tests work under the hood.

ProtoTest is still experimental, and feedback is encouraged. The Quebec Protocol Activation Survey made it clear that the community wants better tooling around proposal development. This release is an early step toward giving teams the ability to validate ideas quickly and safely before moving into formal governance.

Nomadic Labs is asking developers to try it out, report issues, and suggest improvements. The more people put ProtoTest through its paces, the stronger future proposals will be.

Tezos Community Events

Tezos Breakfast Club Returns to Buenos Aires

The Tezos Breakfast Club is back, and this time it’s bringing good coffee and great company to Buenos Aires.

Join local builders and community members for a relaxed morning of conversation, croissants, and connection, the perfect way to start the day.

📍 Café Nómada, Villa Crespo🗓️ Friday, November 21 | 10:00–12:30 (UTC-3)☕ Hosted by Tezos Trailblazers @BosqueGracias and @lucasoxx_

RSVP here: Tezos Breakfast Club: Buenos Aires

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How Art, Code, and Community Converge in the High Desert

Even in a world where everything can be streamed, shipped, or shilled, the hunger for real connection does not fade. Digital tools help us meet each other, but they cannot replicate the feeling of standing face-to-face with people who care about the same ideas. That energy shapes what we create and how we evolve.

So how do we adapt in a time when many feel isolated despite constant connection? By paying attention to cultural moments where the community is working. Where people find each other online and then choose to gather in person to build something greater than a timeline or a feed.

One of those moments happens in the high desert. A pilgrimage to Art Blocks Marfa Weekend 2025 in Marfa, Texas. A place where a movement born online touches land and keeps moving forward.

The Marfa Origin Story

Marfa’s place in web3 culture began with Art Blocks and generative artists who believed creativity could live in code. Eric Snowfro Calderon saw potential in the blank canvas of West Texas. He bought a building and turned it into the Art Blocks House, giving blockchain-based art a home in the real world. No one could have imagined just how much this would fill an unrealized demand.

Marfa 2025: The Fifth Anniversary

This year marked five years of Art Blocks’ gatherings in Marfa. A milestone that confirms generative art has staying power and a heartbeat outside the screen.

Beeple and Jack Butcher attending said a lot. People who operate at the center of attention are traveling to this remote town to participate in the conversation instead of watching from afar.

Every space hosted something intentional and thoughtful. One standout was Efdot’s Desert Grid. The art shifts with the real Marfa sky from day to night, where code and environment work together in harmony.

Another powerful moment came from apocalypticform’s IMAGINES. A shared mosaic based on community submissions. A collective imagination brought together in one evolving installation.

Attendance soared, the Luma RSVP filled fast and the waitlist stretched long. People wanted to be there physically to take part in history as it happened.

What stood out most was the tone. Conversations centered on the future of creativity. More curiosity and collaboration. Less debate over which chain someone uses. Multi-chain discussions felt united instead of divided.

Marfa 2025 made one thing clear. Digital art wants to live in the world. The community is ready to take the next steps together.

Shot provided by Paper Buddha Evolution & the Shift

Early gatherings centered on Ethereum as it led the first wave of generative art entering public awareness. But culture never stands still. Artists evolve. Technology advances. When the hype fades, those committed to the work remain.

As web3 matured, creators started searching for more ecosystems aligned with their values. Sustainable minting. Accessible onboarding. Communities where people discuss art and innovation more frequently than speculating on value. Tezos fits that vision, and a growing wave of artists at Marfa have art minted on Tezos.

At first there were only a few. Then dozens. Now the presence is unmistakable. Picture Paper Buddha and DieWithTheMostLikes each sharing AirBNBs with their communities and members of the Tezos Foundation. Emerging creators standing alongside long-respected figures. Collectors and artists connecting without barriers. Moments like these happen at Marfa, reminding us that titles and reputation change nothing about the human behind the work.

The shift is already taking place, and it isn’t always televised. Tezos continues to quietly influence the web3 art story.

Shot provided by Paper Buddha The Pilgrimage: Arriving And Leaving Marfa

Marfa is remote. Cell service fades. City noise disappears. The slow drive reveals a quiet landscape that feels reserved for artists and outsiders. People travel here because they crave something real. They want conversations that do not need marketing. They want relationships that continue offline.

Walking into Marfa feels like stepping into a shared physical headspace. Those who make the journey show up with the same intention. They want to build real connections. The entire town becomes a literal sandbox for future collaboration.

The numbers tell one part of the story. The people in the room tell the rest. Tezos-aligned artists and builders have found confidence through these in-person collisions. Growth becomes clearer. Creativity expands with each handshake.

Paper Buddha described it well:

“The first time I left Marfa I never stopped thinking about it. The drive in. The isolation. Then the conversations that keep going even after you leave. Real connections gradually transform ecosystems. Presence builds trust. Trust builds expansion.”

Smaller Gatherings, Bigger Conversations

Marfa asks you to slow down. The town is small. You keep seeing the same friends and strangers until they all become familiar. Talks stretch from morning coffee to late-night fire-side hangouts. Ideas deepen without the pressure of a sale.

You meet someone whose work you admire and realize they are on a path just as steady and uncertain as yours. They show up. They keep creating. They invest in community instead of hype.

This environment invites everyone to remember why they make art in the first place. This is the Tezos way. Which is why the Tezos community needs to continue showing up.

Why Showing Up Matters

Online we only see the peaks. In person, we see the climb. We see the work behind the wins and the hope behind the risks. Events like Marfa give us clarity about where we stand and where we want to go next.

Associated memories create sustainability. The stories we take home help us continue through slow weeks and strange markets. Marfa becomes a touchstone. A reminder of what happens when effort meets presence.

As technology enters an era shaped by AI and stronger networks, the chains that support both culture and resilience matter most. The growing participation of Tezos artists in Marfa shows the ecosystem is aligned with that future.

Showing up makes us better creators, clearer thinkers, and stronger collaborators. If we want this space to flourish, we need to meet each other in real life. Go to Marfa. Go to galleries and local meetups. Go anywhere that allows art to breathe as part of face-to-face conversation.

Screens will help us tell the story. But history will be shaped by those willing to gather. The future of digital art depends on people who claim their place in the real world.

So if you want to truly claim your place in this space, show your face. Take the trip. Shake hands. Trade ideas. Build memories that weigh more than followers, floor prices, and feed rankings.

Thank you for reading and for continuing to believe in this world of art. If you are going to Art Basel in Miami, I’ll see you there!

Marfa 2025: A Pilgrimage To Nowhere was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A New Beginning.

In a previous article, I wrote about how hyperinflation, crime, and a broken financial system changed my family life forever. For us, leaving wasn’t just a physical journey, it was a complete mental and emotional rebirth. What I want to share now is how discovering cryptocurrency, and Tezos in particular, became a vital lifeline. It offered me not just financial stability, but a transformative educational journey at a time when trust in traditional money had completely collapsed.

A New Perspective on Money

Living through Venezuela’s economic collapse forced me to question everything I knew about money. Growing up, I, like everyone else, took currency for granted, it was just a stable tool for trade. But, witnessing catastrophic government policies revealed its true nature: fiat currency is fragile, built entirely on trust in institutions that can and do fail. Suddenly, terms like inflation, circulating supply, interest rates, and market capitalization weren’t just economic jargon; they were essential tools for survival.

People often discuss the financial ruin of hyperinflation, but rarely its psychological toll. It completely warps your sense of time and reality. In Venezuela, prices could double in a day. I found myself working longer and longer hours just to afford basic necessities. Planning for the future became impossible, with only a short-term focus. You spent money the second you got it, buying any tangible goods you could find before your cash lost its value. This constant cycle of survival, driven by sheer uncertainty, was quite draining, reshaping your focus, your habits, and your entire outlook on life.

Transparency, Clear rules, Certainty.

This is where cryptocurrency, specifically Tezos, changed my perspective. Unlike fiat, which can be printed endlessly by governments, Tezos operates on a set of transparent rules enforced by the protocol. Its on-chain governance model, where validators (bakers) vote on upgrades (proposals) that can be submitted by anyone in the world, showed me a vision of a truly decentralized, community-driven financial system. For me, this was never about making quick profits. It was about finally understanding the mechanics of money: how it is created, distributed, and controlled.

The transparency was striking. In the crypto world, anyone can look up metrics like total supply, issuance rates, and staking yields through a block explorer. This empowers people to make informed decisions. This stood in contrast to the Venezuelan Central Bank, which at some point took down its website and hid critical data like money supply, inflation, and bond dynamics to “avoid chaos”, leaving citizens completely in the dark. That lack of transparency eroded trust and fueled the crisis.

My Experience with Tezos: A Steady Anchor

During my research into blockchain, Tezos stood out because of its steadfast focus on solving the core blockchain trilemma: balancing security, scalability, and decentralization , without getting into short-term hype. Its governance model, which gives the community a real and formal voice, was the complete opposite of the centralized control I had experienced with both fiat systems and many other crypto projects.

What truly cemented my trust was the community itself. Tezos is filled with knowledgeable members who are deeply committed to its core principles. While communities of other projects often ignore the dangers of multisigs control or centralized road-maps for the sake of short-term gains, the Tezos community calls it out immediately. This unwavering commitment to true cipherpunk ideals, the very ones that made me fall in love with crypto as a tool to fight back against government overreach is what sets it apart. I’ve seen other ecosystems where projects freeze assets, ignore poll results, or where a small group of developers force through a messy fork to save a flawed project. On Tezos, such actions would be really difficult to pull it off. The community’s ethos of decentralization and integrity is its bedrock.

Of course, Tezos isn’t perfect, it’s constantly evolving. But its commitment to fairness and a principled approach is what keeps me engaged. For me, Tezos has always been about the long-term principles, not the short-term gains. The knowledge I’ve gained from its ecosystem far outweighs any drawbacks, making it a project I am proud to support as long as it follows these principles.

Digital Art Revolution as good omens

History has always shown me that art is a powerful force for change. That’s why the passionate art community that grew organically on Tezos felt so significant. It didn’t just blow me away; it was the best possible sign that this was the right place to be.

Now, a new chapter is being written, not on cave walls or canvases, but in the digital realm. And at its heart is a powerful truth: art has always been a form of quiet rebellion. It challenges power and shares bold ideas through creativity, not force.

That’s why what happened on Tezos was so special. It became a true global canvas. For the first time, an artist in Brazil could easily reach a collector in Japan. This wasn’t a planned corporate project; it grew naturally from the ground up.

To me, that organic growth was a sign of hope. It was proof that even today, our basic need to create, connect, and question is alive and well. Art is our history. It’s how societies have always recorded their big ideas, showcased their innovations, and left a permanent mark on the world.

Knowledge as a Lifeline

Ultimately, learning about cryptocurrency was about more than finance, it was my education anchor. Understanding how money works, whether fiat or crypto, exposed the flaws that led to Venezuela’s collapse. Tezos, with its emphasis on governance and adaptability, taught me to question centralized control and to value transparency above all else. It showed me that money could be a tool for freedom, or slavery when it’s mismanaged.

Understanding how money is created, how it can fail, and its potential for good is now my shield against broken economies. It’s a foundation I can use to rebuild anywhere.

Cryptocurrency, especially Tezos, was more than just a financial escape from hyperinflation. It was a gateway to understanding economic systems themselves, saving me from the ignorance that makes such crises so devastating. Today, I carry these lessons with me, knowing that no broken system can ever destroy the power of knowledge.

When Currency Dies, Chapter 2: How Cryptocurrencies Saved My Life was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Month At A Glance — October 2025

A quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones within the Tezos ecosystem for October 2025.

Welcome to our latest issue, Month At A Glance (October 2025), where we give a quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones in the Tezos ecosystem on a monthly cadence.

October felt like a month where a lot of longer-running efforts started to become real: a major game many have been watching finally opened its doors, the next protocol upgrade was announced, and infrastructure pieces, from signers to cloud tooling to analytics and payments rails, continued to lock into place. It wasn’t flashy, but it was substantive. The kind of progress that makes the ecosystem feel more capable, more mature, and more ready for what’s coming next.

Let’s break it all down.

Ecosystem Insights

Tallinn Protocol Upgrade Proposal Announced

In October, core development teams introduced Tallinn, the next Tezos protocol upgrade, now in its stabilization phase and expected to be proposed on-chain in November. The upgrade reduces block time from 8s to 6s, improving responsiveness across everyday interactions, while continuing the transition toward more uniform BLS-based attestations as baker adoption progresses.

Tallinn also introduces Address Indexing, replacing repeated full addresses in contract storage with compact numeric IDs, a change that can reduce storage costs by 50–100× in token and NFT contracts. It’s a practical, performance-focused upgrade that improves efficiency today while laying groundwork for larger-scale applications and future Layer-2 growth.

Reaper Actual Foundation Alpha Goes Live

October finally brought the moment a lot of people in the Tezos space had been waiting for: Reaper Actual opened its Foundation Alpha. This is the tactical extraction shooter led by EverQuest co-creator John Smedley, and it’s not just another “Web3 game announcement.” People were actually playing, loading into Marova, testing weapons, pushing into conflict zones, and getting a feel for the pacing and map flow. After months of early teasers and community buildup, seeing it live felt like a real milestone.

Players could enter the alpha through several access packs, depending on how deep they wanted to go. The Stygian Oath packs, which included extra Reapers and additional perks, sold out quickly, though. If you’re lucky, you might still spot a few floating around on the secondary market. The on-chain component plays a role in how identity and ownership work in the game, but it isn’t a barrier to playing. You can simply jump in and shoot, or you can choose to engage more deeply via owning characters, bases, and cosmetics on-chain. Both paths feel intentional, not forced. It’s early, but the foundation feels solid and the excitement around it is well-earned.

Raspberry Pi BLS Signer Introduced for Bakers

Another noteworthy October development came from Nomadic Labs, who introduced a lightweight Raspberry Pi BLS signer for Tezos bakers. With the shift toward BLS signatures becoming increasingly relevant for future upgrades like Tallinn, this release matters because it gives bakers a simple, affordable, and secure way to handle signing without needing to upgrade to heavier hardware.

The idea is straightforward: instead of running everything on a single machine, the signer can live on a small, isolated Raspberry Pi, reducing attack surface and making key management cleaner. It’s open-source, well-documented, and designed for ease of setup. For existing bakers, this lowers friction in preparing for the BLS-attestation era; for new bakers, it makes entry and key security more approachable. Quietly meaningful progress here, the kind that keeps Tezos’ validator layer accessible.

News From The Tezos Ecosystem: Quick Bits

Beyond those insights, the ecosystem saw plenty of other noteworthy developments worth a quick look:

TezDev 2026 has its date and location March 30th, 2026 in Cannes, France. It’s still early, but the save-the-date gives teams, builders, and community organizers plenty of time to plan ahead. Expect more details on programming and participation closer to the new year.

Etherlink x Google CloudEtherlink announced a collaboration with Google Cloud, and the network is now available through the Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easier for developers to deploy and scale nodes without a custom DevOps setup. As part of the partnership, eligible builders can access up to $200,000 in Google Cloud credits, giving teams real runway to prototype, test, and launch on Etherlink.

MoMI × Tezos Foundation Partnership RenewedThe Museum of the Moving Image and the Tezos Foundation have renewed their partnership for 2025–2026, continuing support for exhibitions, residencies, and public programming exploring digital art and on-chain creativity. This renewal keeps Tezos present in a major cultural institution, reinforcing the chain’s ongoing relationship with the art world.

Forte Integrates EtherlinkForte Pay, the payment and wallet infrastructure used by game studios and consumer apps, launched on Etherlink, giving developers a seamless way to handle purchases, asset ownership, and in-game transactions without forcing users through complicated onboarding flows. This brings familiar, frictionless payment UX into the Tezos ecosystem, the kind that matters when building for mainstream players.

Chainspect Integrates the Tezos EcosystemChainspect, a network comparison and performance analytics platform, now includes the Tezos ecosystem in its live monitoring dashboards. Builders and analysts can track throughput, block times, finality, decentralization factors, and dev activity alongside other networks in real time.

KyberSwap Integrates Tezos via EtherlinkKyberSwap added support for the Tezos ecosystem through Etherlink, enabling swapping, routing, and liquidity visibility directly within the Kyber interface. This lowers the barrier for users coming from EVM environments and gives Tezos projects access to broader liquidity and a tooling layer.

Octav Adds Support for EtherlinkOctav, the treasury management and on-chain analytics platform, added support for Etherlink, making it easy to view token balances, protocol positions, and transaction activity in one place. Teams can also pipe this data directly into their own dashboards using Octav’s API, which is especially useful for DAOs, DeFi projects, and ecosystem analytics.

Tezos Foundation × Processing FoundationThe Tezos Foundation announced a new partnership with the Processing Foundation to launch a creative coding workshop series focused on interactive art and generative expression. Processing has long been a gateway for artists entering code-based art, so this collaboration puts Tezos directly in front of the next wave of creative technologists. It’s a meaningful bridge between established digital art pedagogy and on-chain creation.

Morpho Launches on Etherlink via OkuTradeMorpho, one of the most respected lending/borrowing protocols in the broader DeFi space, is now live on Etherlink through OkuTrade. This brings a familiar, battle-tested DeFi primitive to the Tezos ecosystem, with clean UX and transparent rates. It’s a strong signal that Etherlink is becoming a credible environment for serious DeFi builders, not just early experiments.

Banxa Integrates EtherlinkBanxa, a major global on/off-ramp provider, added support for Etherlink, giving users and apps an easier way to move between fiat and on-chain assets. This simplifies onboarding for new users and reduces friction for products building on Etherlink that need seamless deposits and withdrawals.

Events

Artz Fridays w DarkWheel.tez — October 3rd

Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call—October 7th

Stakehouse Episode 1 — October 9th

Artz Fridays w Scott — October 10th

Tuesday🎙Tezday w Hasbrown — October 14th

Artz Fridays w The Myth (BosequeGracias translating) — October 17th

Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — October 21st

Artz Fridays w Papper Buddha — October 24th

Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — October 28th

Artz Fridays October’s Community Call — October 31st

Stay in the Conversation, Stay in the Know

Tezos Commons hosts a variety of community-oriented events and content. From podcasts, X-spaces, and long-form content, there’s something for everyone.

TezTalks Live

TezTalks Radio

X Spaces

X Shorts

Baking Sheet Newsletter

In-Depth Articles

You can also contact us on X or via email at [email protected].

Month At A Glance — October 2025 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Evolution Of Interactive Pixel Art

As a ‘90s kid, I grew up parallel to a rapidly evolving world of video games. From simple 2D pixelated arcade titles to first-person shooters and virtual simulations of reality, a lot has happened in a short amount of time.

What started as me watching my dad play Pac-Man turned into his basement becoming the local arena for late-night Halo LAN parties with friends. Fast forward to now and entire arenas fill with spectators for competitive gaming events. Cultures and conventions have formed around stories, design, and role-playing, expanding across an ever-growing list of genres. What we’re witnessing is the evolution of an art form that technology has made interactive. The possibilities remain endless.

In this article, I’d like to explore why I believe video games are a form of art and how innovation and technology continue to open new ways to create and experience them. I’ll also touch on how developers are using blockchain technology like Etherlink, the Tezos-powered layer 2 blockchain built for speed and security, as a foundation for new creative possibilities in gaming.

Escaping into Worlds Built by Imagination

Video games have a place in my heart and absolutely have influenced me as an artist. They offered escape when I needed it and inspiration when I least expected it. These digital spaces introduced me to art long before I recognized it as such, through world-building, in-game asset design, composition, character building, soundtrack, and storytelling. Each game world is far more than a painting on canvas, and it is still crafted with artists through intention, pixels, and code.

Gaming taught me that creativity is present in every part of telling a story and involving the audience. Every quest, every environment, every soundtrack was someone’s art, crafted to move players in ways that words alone could not. Essentially, a collaboration, like an orchestra coming together with its countless moving parts, yet somehow creating a harmonious experience.

Complexity and Generational Shifts

Over time, games grew more ambitious. My father’s generation seems to have leaned towards the phone games for the simplicity and nostalgia, while I was drawn to advanced open-world adventures, survival experiences, and high-fidelity graphics. From simplest to most complex, every frame can feel like a moving painting or a scene from a film, though it’s often hard to slow down and appreciate the artistry if you are overwhelmed by what buttons to press or where to go next.

Like many art forms, gaming has a learning curve that can hide the creative process on first impression, or in this case first play through. Some of the most time I’ve ever spent gaming growing up was in Skyrim for example, but it took years for me to truly appreciate the art and story within that game.

The contrast between generations shows how quickly gaming has evolved, yet its essence remains the same. Video games are art in motion, powered by imagination.

The Artistic Core of Game Development

Today gaming stands as one of the most expressive art forms of our time, though it still struggles to be recognized as such. Every layer of development draws from artistic disciplines including concept sketches, sound design, character modeling, architecture, and narrative writing.

Inside those worlds, players become part of the creative process. Similar to how a collector collaborates with an artist when minting an edition on Edit.art, game developers build spaces where art and tech can meet, empowering people to manipulate pixels and impact the outcome of their experience based on decisions made.

In recent years, screenshot contests have become a form of digital photography open call, where players submit their best captures as if they were photographs from another dimension. It’s a subtle reminder that appreciation for in-game visuals is already evolving into its own artistic culture. Screenshots often reveal scenes that could hang on a gallery wall, stunning compositions of light, symmetry, and emotion captured within the game itself. What began as pixels on a screen has grown into a shared art form shaped by both developers and players.

The Next Level: Gaming on the Blockchain

As digital art continues to evolve, so does the infrastructure behind it. The same blockchain technology that helped artists reclaim ownership of their art, collect royalties, and build online communities, is now reshaping gaming. On Tezos, where creativity and experimentation thrive, developers are exploring new ways to merge design with transparent ownership and fair collaboration.

Web3 gaming may have started as trading skins and collectibles, but it also deepens the connection between player and creation. Every asset, animation, and environment carries authorship. Built on systems like Tezos or Etherlink, the authorship can be protected and rewarded through smart contracts.

For players, this means the art within games can be owned, displayed, traded and appreciated in ways that mirror other forms of digital art. For developers and artists, it introduces sustainable rewards through royalties, allowing their creative work to live and grow beyond its initial release. Allowing video games to sustainably exist and evolve free of middlemen and fee-sharing 3rd parties. Ready for you to reveal the art within by interacting and sharing with confidence, the game developers are getting paid.

In this light, Web3 becomes a space where gaming is not only played but preserved as art. The lines between artist, developer, and player begin to blur, forming a new kind of generative medium that lives on-chain and decentralized for you to discover and appreciate.

A New Kind of Appreciation

With the rise of digital art on Tezos, I see video games finding their rightful place among the arts as well. A photographer doesn’t always compose what they capture, for example, a nature photographer. Yet they are still able to capture unique depictions of nature. This is where I come back to players capturing screenshots and how they are like photographers in this way, framing emotional and visual moments from worlds that moved them. Every captured frame carries intention, personality, and a unique perspective.

Metaverse environments are another evolving way to appreciate art in a game-like method, blending virtual spaces, identity, and creative expression into shared experiences. Often using the same controls as computer-based video games. These immersive worlds build on the foundation laid by decades of gaming evolution, proof that interactive storytelling through pixels continues to grow in both depth, use cases and meaning.

The art of gaming is not limited to what is built, it lives in how we experience and share it. As technology and creativity continue to merge, video games stand as proof that the digital realm can hold just as much soul as physical art.

The Future of Interactive Art

For me, gaming started as a way to escape, but it also became a way to connect: with people, with my imagination, and with technology. As this relationship deepens through innovation, we’re witnessing a new era where creativity and technology work hand in hand to elevate numerous art forms in one collaborative art installation we call video games.

Platforms like Tezos and Etherlink offer the next stage of this evolution. They empower artists and developers to create new models of ownership, collaboration, and reward. The idea that players can truly own in-game collectibles or that developers can earn royalties as their worlds expand is just the beginning. It’s the natural next step for gaming as art.

As we move forward, the boundary between creating, playing, and collecting continues to blur. The same passion that drove us to explore new worlds as kids now fuels an ecosystem where innovation, entertainment, community building, and artistry coexist.

Follow Tezos and Etherlink to see how this collaboration between tech and art talent is shaping the next stage of gaming. The future of play is interactive, empowering, expressive, equitable, and built to evolve.

The Art Of Gaming was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A deep dive into the expanding world of Etherlink-powered mobile gaming offering BattleTabs

The road toward blockchain-powered gaming adoption has been a long and winding one. However, in spite of the many fits and starts we’ve seen in the larger blockchain gaming space over the years, the brightest minds in the blockchain industry remain laser-focused on exploring this fascinating use case for its technology to the fullest. And for good reason.

The global gaming market is absolutely massive. Statista estimates that the gaming industry generated more than a whopping $450 billion worldwide in 2024. On top of this, gaming offers an intriguing and promising low-friction entry point to bring new users to the blockchain/crypto space. That’s why finding a pathway into the gaming space is, and long has been, a hugely important priority for those building in the blockchain arena.

While the PC and console gaming spaces can be quite complex to break into, mobile gaming presents a very interesting and much more frictionless opportunity. Build a game, get it on the App Store and Google Play, and you’ve got a direct line to the world’s 3.2 billion (Udonis estimates) active mobile gaming players.

Enter: BattleTabs. Developed by GangBusters Ltd — a UK-based startup focused on developing community-driven blockchain-based social games — Battletabs may just be one of the simplest, friendliest blockchain-powered gaming on-ramps released to date. With 3M+ players across platforms (according to the BattleTabs website) and 20,000+ members in its thriving Discord community, BattleTabs is more than just a proof of concept for blockchain’s promise in the mobile gaming arena — it’s a living, breathing example of what an accessible, user-focused blockchain gaming experience can be.

Exceedingly simple on its surface and fun to play (with a healthy dose of nostalgia within), BattleTabs is stripping blockchain-based gaming down to its purest user-friendly form, and players just can’t seem to get enough.

Let’s take a look at why…

The Game

It may seem overly obvious to state that BattleTabs is reminiscent of the classic board game Battleship (I’m certainly not the first to point it out), but for those who’ve played them both, the similarities are far too striking to miss. While the ships in BattleTabs are much cuter and more interesting than those in Battleship, the fundamentals of the two gameplay experiences are almost identical — even if one is entirely analog and the other entirely digital.

A BattleTabs battle can take place in 3–8 minutes from start to finish. This, coupled with its conceptually simple front-end gameplay, makes BattleTabs an ideal fit for mobile gaming.

It’s what lurks beneath that conceptually simple front-end gameplay, however, that really gives BattleTabs an opportunity to shine. Let’s dive a little deeper and explore the BattleTabs gaming experience more thoroughly…

Gameplay

BattleTabs offers two distinct “turn length” game modes: “Normal”, which provides players with 30 seconds to complete their turns, and “Long”, which allows players a full 24 hours per turn, turning a quick 3–8 minute game into a 2–3 day long epoch.

Once you’ve selected your game mode, BattleTabs finds you an opponent, and the stage is set for your battle. You are then offered the opportunity to make adjustments to your fleet of ships and place them in strategic positions around the board. Once both players have done this, the battle can begin.

Battles consist of targeting squares on your opponent’s board to locate, attack, and sink their ships while they attempt to do the same to yours. While your own ships are fully visible to you throughout the game, your opponent’s ships remain invisible (until they are sunk). Whichever player sinks all of their opponent’s ships first, wins!

Different types of ships are able to target/attack different numbers/layouts of squares, and each ship has its own “cooldown” period once it’s been used to attack, which renders it incapable of attacking again until its cooldown period is complete.

The graphics are clean, cute, and engaging. The gameplay is intuitive, easy to navigate, and fun. Once you finish your first battle and claim your first reward, however, the real fun begins…

Rewards

The BattleTabs reward system is built entirely around in-game assets. Gold coins, gems, and research points drive the BattleTabs in-game economy, but the game’s progressive reward system goes significantly deeper than that. Everything from additional ships for your fleet (each with its own unique in-game battle functionality) to cosmetic assets like custom skins and accessories for your characters can be earned as you progress along in your BattleTabs journey.

Rewards can be earned in several ways. “Daily rewards” are available to claim each day when you log in to the game. Additional freebies appear periodically to be claimed as you explore different sections of the BattleTabs user interface. Participating in battles earns you rewards, winning battles earns you rewards, and the “challenges” tab offers you the opportunity to complete specific in-game tasks and earn additional rewards still.

As rewards accumulate, they open up a whole other layer of the BattleTabs onion. Gold coins can be spent on upgrades and other in-game items. Research points, meanwhile suck you a little further into the BattleTabs universe as you begin to explore the “Research” tab…

Research

The BattleTabs “research” tree is extensive. With 60+ stages, each requiring you to accumulate additional gold coins and research points to complete them, the research tab is where the BattleTabs rabbit hole really begins to make itself known.

New ships, each with their own unique in-game attributes, can be obtained and added to your customized fleet as you progress down the left-hand side of the BattleTabs research tree. The kicker is, while it’s locked when you first enter the research tab, the right-hand side of the research tree can also be unlocked with a “season pass” — available for the low, low price of 145 gems (which can be earned in-game without too much trouble).

The further down the research tree you go, the richer your BattleTabs experience becomes. Customizing your fleet to incorporate additional ships and customizing your player avatar help personalize the BattleTabs gameplay experience and draw you further and further into the fascinating BattleTabs universe.

Community

For such a seemingly simple game, BattleTabs offers a startling level of community engagement. The BattleTabs Discord has over 20,000 members and is filled to bursting with tips, tournament info, memes, bounties, and even opportunities for players to make suggestions about the BattleTabs gameplay and design items like new ships that will be added to the actual game via community feedback and contributions.

BattleTabs has managed to foster a vibrant community filled with lively chats, support, and direct interactions with the game’s decision-makers. All of this adds up to a very robust overall gaming experience, and goes a long way toward explaining BattleTabs’ ongoing success in the marketplace.

To truly wrap your head around the BattleTabs universe, however, you’ll need to play it for yourself…

Getting Started

Play on mobile (App Store or Google Play), on desktop via the Chrome Web Store, or play directly on your browser at battletabs.io.

It’s not complicated. Just jump in, start a battle, and enjoy!

All Hands On Deck! Let’s Play BattleTabs was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.