Everstake is here to share some news on our plans and contributions to the Tezos ecosystem — the ecosystem we strongly believe in as one of the industry leaders.
We are not only believers but doers: Everstake is a multi-chain staking provider and has been running a Tezos baker since early October 2018. The validation part of our company originated as a side business but at its core we’re a team of engineers with experience in building open-source solutions for different blockchain networks (Tezos in particular).
We find product development and improving processes crucially important — the blockchain industry has no other way to survive and dominate soon, to bring us new standards and ways to interact. We were more than happy to find The Tezos Foundation on the same page: the team provides special grants to support building tools that will help developers build novel products and services on Tezos and contribute to the growth of its ecosystem.
The Tezos Foundation has made one of its key priorities to fund the development of open source block explorers to help community members analyze the network. That is the place our competence is applied — we are proud to be among several other teams within a great initiative of community sourced development. Within a well-funded initiative with a USD 6.2M budget.
Over the past few months we have been able to build a competitive and informative Tezos block explorer. We do love to streamline and harmonize a huge data flow. It was done to increase the efficiency of your analytics while a number of features were delivered to make your interaction with the data as easy and smooth as possible. But the excellence has no limit, thus our team keeps the pace of developing the next product version.
In the future we’d like to continue working on TezTracker and expand its functionalities making it a one-stop solution for anyone browsing the Tezos network. For the past couple of months or so we have been brainstorming, gathering and analyzing information and researching possible new features and we are sure that we can bring additional value to the ecosystem. Now it’s time to dive in!
In the current iteration we’re going to focus on 3 areas that we think are/will be hugely important for the ecosystem in general and individual token holders in particular:
1) Customized UX
2) Data and Stats,
3) NFTs and Assets.
There are other things that we wanted to implement as well but the 3 areas provided above is something that in our opinion will be extremely beneficial to the ecosystem.
Customized UX
Personalization of your interaction, your dialog with the ecosystem makes your activity more efficient thus successful. Originally we wanted to do this through personal accounts but bumped into a few issues where it didn’t make sense to implement them. Right now we have a vision of how and why to do it and most importantly there are tools that can help us do it rather quickly and seamlessly.
First of all, we’re going to integrate with Beacon for user authorization and sending payloads. Most of the Tezos users are already familiar with it and have used it before. Integration with Beacon will allow anyone to perform a basic set of operations without leaving Teztracker.
In fact, most of the work has been done already and we’ll be sharing an update soon with detailed instructions.
Having a personal account will allow you to do the following things:
- receive custom messages regarding operations and account balances via email
- use your individual dashboard which provides the information on rewards, baker performance, allows to view statements for a given timeframe, etc.,
- send payloads and initiate other operations e.g. delegations directly from the Teztracker.
Data and Stats
The industry is far from its maturity but wild-wild-west-stage is almost over. It means that any project/product/ecosystem, which has plans to grow and attract users/resources, must keep in mind — traction is 24/7. No chances to hide bad performance, lots of chances to find profitable performance.
Data is a new gold and TezTracker is both your gold mine and a hammer itself!
Data representation will focus on several aspects that will help you — member of the community — to make informed decisions:
- Whale Tracking — this section will include:
- map of all transfers between the top accounts since the launch
- list of top accounts,
- signaling on the biggest XTZ movements within the network with the correlation to price fluctuations;
2. Baking and Delegation Stats — this section will cover:
- delegation activity with bakers gaining and losing delegators and stake amounts,
- top bakers race graph and chart showing the history of Tezos delegation,
- baker efficiency stats;
3. Accounts Breakdown — it will focus on outlining and grouping different accounts based on
- stake amounts,
- level of activity in general as well as their delegation activity,
- period of holding the stake;
4. Governance Stats — it will cover the unanimity, speed and level of activity of bakers in governance.
NFT’s and Assets
July 2020, the total NFT market recorded USD 100M in trades. December 2020 — the total has since increased by over 50% to USD 154M. Numbers are too far from something to surprise crypto-activists, but the dynamics is important.
We do believe that the NFT market has a lot of potential. Several teams are already working on their implementations and hopefully we’ll see them in production soon. Besides, TQ is working on Openminter which will greatly simplify the process of launching any non-fungible token that you can imagine.
Following the concept of the one-stop solution, our plan is to integrate OpenMinter on TezTracker and become another outlet for people to come to and create NFTs. The idea is that the more NFTs there are and the easier it is to create them the better for the ecosystem in general and for the explorer in particular. We’re planning to use the OpenMinter backend and combine with our custom UI.
Given all of the above, we believe that it only takes one or two NFTs to launch to pave the path for everyone else. Potentially, there’ll be hundreds of different NFT types in the near future which will create an ecosystem within the greater Tezos ecosystem. NFT ecosystem will require an explorer and a mapping/analytical tool to it, a tool to quickly get a clear picture, find something or check for previous owners of a particular token. What we’re planning to build is a tool that will have an individual approach to each NFT type, outlining their history, properties, interconnectivity, etc but will also provide a bird-eye view of a given NFT type and the whole ecosystem in general.
Along with NFT’s we’re set to increase the functionality related to FA assets. With Dexter being launched and already getting a lot of attention and Quipuswap in its final pre-release stage, we see it as our obligation to keep the community informed on what is going on with FA assets and provide as much data as possible in the most convenient way possible.
Other functionality
We’re planning on extending and improving the UI/UX of TezTracker by implementing the following things:
- CSV exports,
- extended page of financial assets,
- comparative table of baker data from 3rd party services (like tezos-nodes, BB, etc.); this should help delegators to compare various options and make decisions,
- Tezos glossary (separate section with essential Tezos terms and phrases,) containing approximately 60 words and phrases that are commonly used in the ecosystem,
- improved UI/UX (support of German, French, Spanish and Korean languages, denomination in USD, EUR, GBP, RMB and JPY, tooltips and hints, etc.),
- separate feedback and comments page.
Everstake team welcomes your feedback on the above! We are more than open for the dialogue to create the best one-stop solution for Tezos ecosystem, for its community — for YOU!
PS: Please be informed that some of the above-mentioned features have been developed and implemented by the team already during the holiday season (while the report was being created). Yep, hot time changes our holiday habits and steals our Santa (but who cares when the history is being made). So stay tuned to more updates on new features in the nearest time!
