Sygnum’s offering of Tezos staking services serves as validation of the network’s security and longevity, and is yet another step on the path towards major institutional and enterprise adoption. We look forward to partnering with Sygnum on more Tezos-based offerings in the future.” Tezos Foundation Head of Enterprise Adoption EMEA David Fuchs said.

Sygnum is the first regulated bank to launch staking for Tezos (XTZ), secure custody, trading, credit and staking service for the coin is now available on the bank platform. Staking can be withdrawn or discontinued at any point in time decided by the user.

The launch of this service has enabled Sygnum to further strengthen it’s multi-custody platform which includes Taurus protect and a strategic partnership with Custodigit , which leverage Metaco. The Sygnum API allows the bank to offer an ever-expanding range of services to banks and other financial institutions. The bank also has dealings with Swiss HSM provider Securosys to custodise it’s DCHF, as well as asset tokens.

“We are strong supporters of Tezos and its unique Liquid Proof-of-Stake governance mechanism, which aligns with our Sygnum values,” says Martin Burgherr, Sygnum Bank’s Chief Clients Officer. “With XTZ staking, our clients can access a unique asset which offers staking rewards and enables them to structure their digital asset portfolios in more creative ways. Tezos is the first Proof-of-Stake (PoS) token on Sygnum Bank’s platform, where we are continually expanding our offering to provide more choice for our clients,” he adds.

About Sygnum

Sygnum is the world’s first digital asset bank, and a digital asset specialist with global reach. With Sygnum Bank AG’s Swiss banking licence, as well as Sygnum Pte Ltd’s capital markets services (CMS) licence in Singapore, Sygnum empowers institutional and private qualified investors, corporates, banks and other financial institutions to invest in the digital asset economy with complete trust. Sygnum operates an independently controlled, scalable and future-proof regulated banking platform. Our interdisciplinary team of banking, investment and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) experts is shaping the development of a trusted digital asset ecosystem. The company is founded on Swiss and Singapore heritage, and operates globally. To onboard digitally with Sygnum, please visit www.sygnum.com.

The official announcement states that the Delphi Network will typically reduce the amount of gas consumed by around 75% due to a number of improvements to the blockchain Michelson interpreter. Storage costs have also been reduced to about 4 times lower compared to its initial cost.

“When you combine upgrade regularity with the reduced gas costs that this particular upgrade brings, Tezos is ripe for DeFi development,” noted Hugo Renaudin, co-founder of LGO Group and founder of Bender Labs.

The Ethereum gas prices are different to that of  Tezos, unlike Ethereum, gas is not used to pay fees on Tezos, they mainly serve as a limiter to prevent apps from consuming too much computing power. Gas prices are paid dude to the complexity of computations that are required to perform any given operations.

Gabriel Alfour, the lead developer at Marigold who served as a core developer of the Delphi upgrade spoke on the importance of low gas cost for DeFi applications.

“With the Delphi upgrade, the Tezos protocol has become significantly more attractive for DeFi applications and experimentation with complex smart contracts due to dramatically reduced gas costs, Alfour said.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Decentralized application (DApps) have gained momentum since early this year. The demand for the DeFi ecosystem grew greatly and even raised concern for Ethereum gas prices. To eliminate this from happening again the Ethereum Network is going to launch ETH 2.0. Tezos upgrade might help DeFi builders cut down on cost and to use the Tezos blockchain more.

Tezos

Tezos is an open-source platform for assets and applications backed by a global community of validators, researchers, and builders.

Investors of Tezos who decide to store their coins on BitGo will be entitled to a 6% annual return from their cold and hot wallets. Institutional investors will be able to generate block rewards staking while assets remain in a secured, insured cold storage. 

Tezos

Tezos is a peer to peer, distributed and permissionless network with the goal of making notable improvements to itself and the existing blockchains. The blockchain is capable of modifying its own set of rules with minimal disruption to the network through an On-chain governance protocol.

Check out Tezos Crypto Review for 2020

“Tezos is one of the most promising projects in the blockchain space with its focus on governance, quick confirmation times, staking and security,” said Pete Najarian, Chief Revenue Officer, BitGo

Blockchain Name service helps solve the problems of long complicated addresses, take for example a Tezos wallet address. One can not easily read or memorize the Alphanumeric patterns of wallet addresses and this applies to all cryptocurrency wallet addresses out there. The Naming system solves this problem by attaching human readable wallet addresses to those standard addresses. An example to quickly understand the system is: say you wanted to replace a standard wallet address like tz52VS….kcjb with an easy readable form like this Sam.tez . This simple form will allow users to easily read and memorize wallet addresses and might not copy paste your address the next time they need to send you some Tezos. It also helps Developers to attach names to their smart contracts making it easier for Dapps to discover and interact with those contracts. Miroslav pointed out that this is only an early draft and is likely to be changed along the way. You can see the proposal here. 

Further Info

The project plans to sell names at open action, bidding will be public and names sold to the highest bidder. Domain names that are expired or had no buyers previously will be sold using the FIFS model of First come first Serve. 

They plan to make Tezos name system to initially support a limited set of characters that will not share lookalike characters with other platforms, this is to help avoid phishing attacks. They plan on launching the service supporting Latin (pure ASCII) names which will be ending with .tez top level domain. 

He also stated that they plan on supporting Unicodes later in the future if the risks are reduced. 

Other Projects that offer Naming service. 

There seem to be a lot of projects with Blockchain Names out there, one notable is the Ethereum Name service which has been integrated with other platforms like Meta-mask. 

Other notable projects are NEO, Zilliqa, Name coin etc. 

Coinbase stakes Tezos on behalf of customers and also distributes the rewards directly to customers’ accounts. With the launch, Coinbase is offering an easy, secure way for the United Kingdom and European countries (France, Spain, and Netherlands) to participate on the Tezos Network. In our article on Tezos review, we indicated that anyone who wanted could become a Baker( Tezos term for Stakers), and if an individual chose not to do this directly, he could delegate to another user. 

Coinbase had previously  launched this feature for the US users alone back in November. Since then customers have earned over $2 million in Tezos from staking.

What to Expect

Coinbase is offering you a platform to simply stake Tezos with a click without having to go through the confusing, complicated means.

• Coinbase promises an estimated 5% Annual returns on Staked coins. You get to see your pending rewards increase on the platform and you get to receive rewards every 3 days with the option to opt out and withdraw your Tazos funds at any point in time.
• You have control over your assets, you earn tokens by keeping funds in your Coinbase wallet, this means you can still see your funds among other assets on your balance. 

Tezos network sets the return rate based on the number of participants in the staking, so Coinbase cannot for a certainty give a specific return price. The estimated annual 5% returns promised to users is as a result of the rewards that had been generated over the past 90 days.

Tezos as a cryptocurrency is subject to market fluctuations, as a result staked assets will have a dynamic price over time. Coinbase will send out a portion of your reward and take their commission.

Conclusion

Staking can help grow one’s investment portfolio exponentially if you’re an investor that invests and holds to the investment for a very long amount of time. The POS protocol focuses on those with a large stake, that is a large amount of coins in order to get a good amount of return. The more coins, the more staking power. Banks too have started giving interest rates to any that would hold BTC in their accounts with some of them having deposit bonus.

This article goes over the 3 main aspects of Tezos and what it is.

Tezos is a peer to peer, distributed and permissionless network which aims at making a few notable improvements over other existing blockchains .

It’s a self-amending decentralized platform for building and deploying DAPPs (Decentralized Applications), also it’s similar to Ethereum in a way that both of them are blockchains on which other projects can build on utilizing Smart contracts.

Tezos is a technology for deploying a blockchain capable of modifying its own set of rules with minimal disruption to the network through an On-chain governance protocol.

The project sells itself as Self-amending and on-chain governance.

The source code is implemented on Ocaml- a fast flexible, functional programming language. The smart contracts are built in Michelson, a programming language used in other important fields of service as well.

Tezos Tokenomics (According to CMC)

Name – Tezos

Ticker – XTZ

Cir. Supply – 712m

Total supply – 712m

Consensus – POS Mechanism

Lets evaluate some key features in Tezos

ON-Chain Governance 

In Tezos, all stakeholders can participate in governing the Tezos protocol. The On-chain governing network allows holders of Tezos native token XTZ to vote on decisions that affect the future direction of the project protocol.

So how this works is, say a developer has an idea or a suggestion that he thinks will better the network protocol and probably improve blockchain in some way. They put forward this suggestion with an invoice on the change they plan to implement. All Tezos holders cast a vote on this suggestion. If the suggestion passes, it is then deployed to the testnet, this is to test the proposed idea or change and see if it does all the developer claims it should and how it affects the blockchain. When it does as claimed, XTZ holders cast yet another vote – this time around deciding if it will stay or not, if it’s decided as stay, it’s sent to the mainnet to be implemented.

The On-chain governance protocol helps 3 parties stay active – The Tezos Project, the developers and stakeholders.

The developers are rewarded for ideas brought up to enhance the protocol, this makes them always look out for ideas that will help the Tezos protocol. By extension this helps the Tezos project stay active.

The voting power given to the Stakeholders or holders of the coin XTZ makes them important in the ecosystem, since they get to decide what stays and what doesn’t. They own a voice too and this prevents centralization of the project.

Self-Amendment Feature

The self amendment feature allows Tezos blockchain to make much easier upgrades and always open to adding the latest innovations to its network. Self-amendment allows Tezos to upgrade without having to Fork (split) the network into different blockchains. The splitting of the blockchains can divide a community, alter stakeholders incentives and disrupt the network effects that are formed over the time.

BAKING (Validating or Staking)

Tezos has an amusing name for those who help Validate the network, they are known as Bakers. Baking is the act of signing and publishing blocks to the Tezos blockchain. Bakers help the POS consensus by ensuring that all transactions in a block are correct, orders of the transaction are agreed upon, and mostly importantly that there is no double spending occurring.

Bakers help validate transactions and add them to the blockchain, they are rewarded with additional XTZ for securing the network. The Baking position is open for anyone interested, you can request to become a Baker here.

Bakers are required to deposit a particular amount known security deposit before participating in the Consensus process. If a participant behaves dishonestly, they stand a chance of loosing their security deposits. Users who are not interested with participating directly on the consensus can delegate to other users to do that on their behalf.

MICHELSON

One of the differences Tezos shares with Ethereum is the programming language. Michelson is the programming language of Tezos. It facilitates formal verification, this method is commonly used in mission-critical environments such as automotive vehicles, nuclear reactors etc.

The language allows users to prove the properties in their smart contracts through a formal verification process. The programming language is strongly typed, stacked base and does not contain features such as name function, closure and Polymorphism.

This is how the Tezos gitlab explains the Michelson programming language.

A Michelson program is a series of instructions that are run in sequence: each instruction receives as input the stack resulting of the previous instruction, and rewrites it for the next one. The stack contains both immediate values and heap allocated structures. All values are immutable and garbage collected.

The types of the input and output stack are fixed and monomorphic, and the program is type checked before being introduced into the system. No smart contract execution can fail because an instruction has been executed on a stack of unexpected length or contents.

You can check out this medium article too for more info on how it works and is done.

TEAM

Tezos was developed by ex-Morgan Stanley analyst Arthur Breitiman, with the support of his wife Kathlen Breitman. Arthur is a computer scientist and mathematician who has working experience in the financial sector. He believed that BTC does not have the ability to evolve, so he provided what he thought was the solution, which was Tezos. He has worked with different large corporations like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Kathleen also has experience in the financial sector, working previously for renowned companies such as Bridge water associates and R3 where she learned Distributed Database Technology.

The project’s ICO is one of the best since they were able to raise $232m in just two weeks back in 2017. The project’s beta in July 2018. You can see more team members here 

Exchanges to get XTZ

Being one of the oldest projects still out there, they are listed in a lot of top exchanges. Here are some

Binance
Binance US
Coinbase Pro
Digifinex
Kucoin
Bitfinex
OKEx
Poloneix
LAToken etc.

CONCLUSION

Although this is not financial advice, XTZ does seem like a good investment choice. It’s one of those projects that has been striving to build up their name in the crypto space. They have achieved that and continue to do that despite the fact that they have faced a good amount of lawsuits. As at the time of writing, it ss sitting in the 11th position on CoinMarketCap with a market cap of over 2 billion $.