This is a fantastic breakdown and I will dig deeper into it, prob grab a small bag. Has anyone here in the community taken a dive into what $sushi is doing with their, yet to launch, NFT marketplace called Shoyu? If they can pull it off, it would probably be one of the most comprehensive NFT market sites. All NFTs priced in $sushi might drive some demand for token.
I don't know about this one BTB. I've been in this space for a long time (been part of the Tezos ICO), and I think Tezos really has had a slow start (not helped by the lawsuit). Admittedly, hic etc nunc has been making some waves. Some. Every chain which hasn't blown up in price makes the same claim, Decred says they focus on development over marketing too etc.
Polkadot and Solana are far from being "copy pasta ETH". I see articles of this kind all over Messari Pro, no need for BTB to post similar articles. I come to BTB for a clear head not any shilling of L1 projects.
It is now ser, will have problems, but the blockchain design is very good and non parasitic. Don’t forget about the Canary network in which is live and faster 7x development than DOT.
There's no mention of the early disputes amongst founding members that ultimately doomed Tezos. The project was promising, until the lawsuits:
“There has been a totally inadequate deployment of resources,” by the current foundation, said Olaf Carlson-Wee, the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency investing fund Polychain Capital, which signed on to be one of the new foundation’s seven directors. Polychain invested an undisclosed amount in last summer’s Tezos offering.
Tezos has not "focused" on the tech to the exclusion of marketing, they have a gouche billboard, as the article noticed, in the New York Mets stadium: they're desperate. They're incompetent *both* at marketing and tech. The reason the project floundered is due to severe mismanagement by the founding team.
"One thing that makes them really stand out in the broader market is the incredible amount of marketing that each network and their teams have done"
versus Tezos building foundations: "Tezos on the other hand has taken a different approach over the past 3 years and instead focused on building out a strong ecosystem that has tangible widespread use"
Just to quickly come to: tezos spending big on big brands for marketing lol
"of the many partnerships that Tezos has (for example, Red Bull Racing), the one with the New York Mets (and subsequent mainstage advertisement in the stadium each game) "
Also the other chains are quickly dismissed as ETH copy cats and end of story? lol
Please elaborate :) Haven't looked too much into the other ones, but Solana is PoS from the start and smart contracts are not even EVM
Either way, would be good to have a website to compare growth across competing chains, example https://flippening.org/ - but this one is just tracking ETH vs BTC
Happy to elaborate. Tezos, up until recent months, has had 0 marketing efforts put into the chain since its inception (go read historical posts on Tezos Reddit, it has been an extreme frustration over the past 2-3 years). Instead, they focused on building well function protocols and platforms on the network (which is a better strategy IMO, delayed gratification because the protocol and chain are well established). Now that the foundation is built, many on-chain upgrades (7 to date), with tangible growth across functioning DeFi, NFT, DAO, stablecoins, STOs, etc., Tezos is now heavily focused on marketing. That is the order of events, which has been the opposite of other mentioned chains. For example, Cardano STILL doesn't have smart contract capabilities (I have heard rumors this is coming soon, but we will see, and it is likely to see many hiccups). Cardano has been heavily marketed, and shilled by its leader Charles Hoskinson (great marketer but cannot deliver on any technical promises. He got kicked out of Ethereum Dev from what I understand). Not saying Cardano won't succeed as well, but for it to be valued at close to $100B without functioning smart contracts is silly.
Still have more to learn about Solana, but from what I understand it is extremely centralized and cannot provide smart contract call data (which is a red flag). Also I was under the impression it was EVM (but could be wrong on that). https://explorer.bitquery.io/ has data, but outside of ETH the data is inconsistent or doesn't make sense (Matic says it had 1.6B SCC in August, no way that is correct, ETH had 120M for comparison).
However you only have Cardano as a bad apple, among all the competing chains.
"many on-chain upgrades (7 to date)"
Microsoft also releases a big update for Windows every few years, it's no big deal? Ethereum also had quite few upgrades in the meantime? Compare that to a SaaS which could be updated every day?
Ethereum will likely take 2-3 years all in to upgrade to ETH 2.0, so no it’s not an easy thing to do when you don’t have on-chain governance built into the protocol. Also, you mentioned Microsoft and SaaS companies, which are centralized organizations. Decentralization makes it difficult to upgrade, again, google around about ETH 2.0. You’re comparing apples to oranges.
Lawsuit was settled, $25M, unregistered securities sale. Put way behind them. Not related to a couple bad actors that caused board fighting early on 2017/early 2018 related to using some money for personal use (isolated and that individual/s has not been associated with Tezos since 2018). Neither have to do with their technology, adoption, growth, upgrades, marketing efforts (now), etc. now deep into 2021.
How have they not focused on tech, Tezos (as a community) has upgraded the protocol 7 times? I provided an entire article on tech and development (including various links), lol.
Marketing - they haven't focused at all on marketing up until recently, which I noted in the article and said it has come to the frustration of some in the community (so not sure what you're trying to say here). My argument is that marketing efforts now make more sense with a well developed and functioning protocol.
The lawsuit, which was left out of the article, is not a minor detail.
Tezos launched before Solana and Polkadot (ie, at least, from memory, they had a listed token before Polkadot and Tezos is an ancient project compared to Solana). At one point in time, Tezos was a top 10 coin on Coinmarketcap. Now both Polkadot and Solana are top 10 coins, and Tezos trails far behind in the 30s.
Tezos, like other early projects such as Zilliqa and EOS has essentially failed. Zilliqa was promising too. EOS was one of the few bad calls BTB made (ie, EOS was shilled in the crypto triangle investing book by BTB/WallStreetPlayboys).
Putting such high weight on "smart contract calls" as a means to measure the success of Tezos, without much context or other analysis strikes me as suspicious. Various metrics are "gamed" and faked all the time in crypto. So Tezos has started to engage in marketing -- are they perhaps inflating their stats as well? So the chain with the most smart contract calls wins?
Tezos is written in a somewhat obscure programming language called OCaml. This fact is often listed as a selling point, as the language is thought to be "academic" or "serious" or good for a variety of reasons. What do developers think of Tezos? Are they really adopting it? Do they like OCaml?
The way that Solana is lazily dismissed as a "copypasta" project, which is untrue, and without any other critique betrays the author of this article. Solana was started much later than Tezos yet quickly overtook the project on Coinmarketcap. Have you heard Anatoly Yakovenko describe his strange ideas about time and "proof of history" (https://docs.solana.com/cluster/synchronization) ? The Solana team is doing something different.
You are associating success and failure based on market valuation (LOL). I am pointing to on-chain audited metrics which shows exponential growth (in the form of SCC) from a fully functioning protocol that is NOT in testnet phase. My thesis at the end of the day is that as Tezos sees growth in SCC it will be valued at the same multiple resulting in a higher (reasonable and conservative) valuation.
Solana doesn't even have SCC data and is still in Testnet phase, so is being valued off a roadmap and white paper at ridiculously high valuations. I'm not suggesting Solana and these other projects won't exist, or won't be successful, or that they won't have good tech.
I consider Cardano to be a failed project too <3, and it has a high market cap. BTB says "banks are zeros", but god, make no mistake, many of these projects are zeroes too.
Solana is also extremely centralized and is having some big issues with NFT scams. In your comment below you said you consider Cardano to be a failed project, yet you are also arguing that market cap is a indicator of success (Cardano is valued at $77B rank 3)??
I'd love to see a value comparison of all the major smart-contract platforms. It is difficult to continuously aggregate TPS and SCC for all the different blockchains.
Sorry for the late comment, but I've been into mostly fuckery for the last 3 weeks and am catching up.
First, thanks to whoever wrote this... good analysis. The way you used SCC to value the project was interesting. Stealing it.
Second, I'm heavy into SOL and won't be looking into another project. And I already dumped my small bag of Tezos earlier this year on a pump. I don't think it has the 'stuff', and the technology was underwhelming to me. Also, the protocol's incentives will work against its use short-term, IMO.
But that's just a guess. Nobody knows what is going to happen. I'll probably be wrong to some extent—only so many bags to grab though.
What is the name of the discord? I was hoping to find some answers for a quipuswap error I am getting. I have set up a kukai wallet and connected it to Quipuswap, but I am getting an error when trying to swap xtz for plenty.
Error is as follows: Some of the parameters you provided are invalid and the request could not be completed. Please check your inputs and try again.
Do I need to up my slippage tolerance? Currently set at 12%.
I would just trim the amount of XTZ for plenty by 1 so you're not using your full balance when making the trade, or break it up into a couple smaller trades. Should fix the problem. You don't need slippage higher than 3%.
You've put a valuation for what Tez should be EOY. To see if worth looking at need to compare to ETH. Do you have an expected valuation for ETH?
Seems like marketing is big downside here. I can't imagine the overlap of people who care about Latin- "hit et nunc" and crypto overlap often. Have heard there's lots of good art on tezos network.
1000* - Otherwise the number would be a small decimal and would make it a nuisance for comparison purposes (since Market Values are in the Billions and SCC are in the millions). So it's just for optics.
This is a very well written analysis on Tezos. Never thought to look at Smart Contract Calls to value a chain. Would be great to see an analysis like this on Solana.
Thank you! And yes agreed - but most other chains data is either bad / inaccurate or doesn't exist. For example, Solana doesn't have this data available (which to me is a red flag).
Super late response to this, but I did a similar (more visual-based) version back in April for MATIC. I was planning on doing way more work on the more qualitative value model and extending the template across chains but life got it the way.
Now that I quit my job I may restart and AVAX was always next on my list. It has been the most undervalued coin since Feb when I ran the same metrics. Crazy it took this long for people to realize the immense progress they had made, value stored on chain and pace of active address growth....
tezos is a good working product. Will look at it for defi. I like DOT too in terms of a blockchain design by having the token really being used by all holders, unlike projects that are parasitic (means raising tokens and dumping it on market for funds). It is launching and will have problems, but it will catch up. Excited for metcalfe’s Law on it. I’m not promoting DOT, just sharing my perspective in terms of blockchain design where projects not dumping funds like parasites.
Reading through the comments, I agree that Tezos has largely fallen off the radar and it is hard to envision a world where Tezos truly competes for market share with other L1s (or L2s in the case of Polygon). But none of that really matters, as you mentioned, if the usage growth is there.
I am building both a quantitative and qualitative valuation model for comparable networks that offers insight into which are trading above and below "fair market value" (which I've defined in a number of ways - mostly usage/user based, so I am really interested in where/how you are pulling the SCC metric. My first thought is that it seems like gauging the maturity of primitives and overall adoption is largely lost by that metric because it doesn't take into account size of transaction nor number of users. Please correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't the recent "growth" be driven by a small number of large players interacting with less complex (and thus costly) smart contracts?
When performing a comparable analysis, I typically start with gauging growth based on active addresses and number of number of wallets holding a balance. I then look at trading multiples against two primary metrics:
TVL (DeFi + staked value on PoS chains) - I realize the weaknesses in this metric but it ends up being negligable in comparison to the wildly diverse multiples that emerge.
Transfer Volume - meaning value of Trezos (I don't like using the using the phrase "transaction volume" here because it is mistaken as trading volume.
Their are a number of other metrics I look at, but to me, there are no others that adequately reveal existing operational utility, growth prospects, and value accumulation. TVL, even though not completely accurate, establishes a baseline figure for network value.
Using these metrics, I immediately realized how grossly undervalued MATIC and AVAX were 9mo ago against their competitors and went all in. Now that the space is more populated/up and running, I performed the same multiple comparison a month ago and found not much had changed apart from AVAX being even more undervalued...although it's far more in line at this point in time :)
Long story short, I would love incorporate SCC into my assessment, but would be interested to get your perspective on what it actually indicates and how it might be misleading.
I think it could be the opposite, given the spike in interest of NFTs on Tezos, so therefore large number of small players interacting with smart contracts.
By transfer volume, do you mean transaction volume on the network (and as you said, not trading volume)? Tezos is close to 50% of Ethereum's TV, so curious how that would look based on your model.
Would love to chat with you further, could you DM me on Twitter? @bowtiedtruther
Yea absolutely. Would love to know where you are pulling the data. And yes, sorry forgot to include that after the () part. Value of all on chain transactions per day.
Also forgot to thank you for this post. Need more discussion (and subsequent debates) on fundamentals in this ecosystem and how we can make data-driven valuation assessments based on on-chain data. I will shoot you a dm :)
Links to Q&A/Platforms/Wallets/References (Written by BowTiedTruther)
For those who are interested in taking the deep dive into Tezos after reading this post, I have provided
below a list of various resources that should be helpful in getting started and more acclimated. This
list is by no means exhaustive. The Tezos Reddit thread, Twitter, Discord, etc. are also great resources.
Recommended Tezos wallets
▪ List of recommended wallets: https://tezos.com/learn/store-and-use/
▪ Popular wallets: Kukai (https://wallet.kukai.app/), works on mobile browsers), Temple
(https://templewallet.com/) (both allow you to link via Ledger Nano)
▪ Be sure to use the links provided on the Tezos.com page, beware of phishing sites
Staking on Tezos (Baking and Delegating)
▪ How does Baking work?
• On the “POS” based blockchain Tezos, holders can participate in the process of
forming blocks and are rewarded for it by staking themselves if they hold enough Tez
(8000 per roll), or by delegating their Tez to a “Baker” while keeping full control of
their Tez : https://baking-bad.org/docs/tezos-staking-for-beginners/)
▪ Where do I stake?
• You choose between several addresses where you can delegate your Tez from a
wallet, by comparing relevant metrics (rewards, free space, voting
history: https://baking-bad.org/docs/where-to-stake-tezos) of different Bakers
(https://baking-bad.org/ or https://tzkt.io/bakers/all or https://tezos-nodes.com/)
• Ledger Live allows you to delegate right from their platform
▪ How long do I have to wait before I get my rewards?
• It takes between 30-40 days to receive the first payout, then every 3 days
(https://baking-bad.org/docs/tezos-staking-for-beginners/)
▪ How to become a baker on Tezos?
• https://wiki.tezosagora.org/use/baking/setting-up-a-secure-baker
• https://wiki.tezosagora.org/use/baking/key-baking-resources
▪ Corporate bakers on Tezos?
• EDF Exaion (https://exaion.edf.fr/en/exaion/our-news/exaion-edf-group subsidiary-becomes-a-tezos-baker)
• Ubisoft (https://twitter.com/ubisoft/status/1384451272992976898)
• Wakam (https://www.wakam.com/tezos_baker/)
• Smartlink (https://www.smartlink.so/baker/) – this is an extremely interesting
project with a lot of potential. You can purchase SMAK on QuipuSwap
currently and on Plenty in the near future.
A few (not all) DeFi platforms on Tezos
▪ Decentralized exchanges (DEX), AMMs, Farming, Liquidity Pools:
• Plenty (https://www.plentydefi.com/swap)
• Quipuswap (https://quipuswap.com/swap)
• Wrap Protocol (https://app.tzwrap.com/wrap)
▪ Lending: Youves (https://app.youves.com/), Kolibri Finance (https://kolibri.finance/)
▪ Stablecoins: USDtz, wUSDT, wUSDC, USDS (Stably), kUSD (Kolibri), uUSD by Youves
(dollar pegged), EURL by Lugh (euro pegged),
NFT platforms/projects on Tezos
▪ What are NFTs, and why Tezos is the best place to mint/collect them (OneOf
presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpEIl9JdZTU,
9
▪ McLaren presentation: https://www.mclaren.com/racing/inside-the-mtc/nft-guide/
▪ Red Bull presentation: https://www.redbull.com/ie-en/redbullracing/tezos-joins-as-official blockchain-partner)
▪ NFT Marketplaces:
o Hicetnunc (https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/)
o Objkt (https://objkt.com/)
o Kalamint (https://kalamint.io/)
o Truesy (https://www.truesy.com/)
o Bazaar (https://bazaarnft.xyz/)
o Minterpop (https://minterpop.com/)
▪ Music: OneOf (https://www.oneof.com/), AmplifyX (https://www.amplifyx.com/)
▪ Sport: https://www.goldengoals.io/
▪ Comics: https://interpopcomics.com/home
▪ Trading card games: https://www.pixelpotus.com/
▪ Programmatically randomly generated avatars: https://objkt.com/collection/tezzardz
Other use cases on Tezos
▪ CeFi use cases on Tezos
• Société Générale bank (https://www.societegenerale.com/en/news/press release/first-structured-product-public-blockchain)
• InCore Bank (https://cointelegraph.com/news/swiss-b2b-bank-incore-launches new-tokenization-tool-using-tezos)
• Equisafe investment (https://www.equisafe.io/)
• Aqarchain real estate investment (https://aqarchain.io/)
• MountX real estate investment (https://www.mountx.io/post/mountx-vertalo choose-tezos-for-first-ever-tokenization-of-real-estate-in-mexico)
▪ E-voting: Electis (https://www.electis.io/)
▪ Comics and Gaming: Interpop (https://www.interpop.io/)
Future projects to be excited about
▪ NFTs from exclusive partnerships with Tezos:
• Red Bull Racing (https://www.redbull.com/ca-en/redbullracing/tezos-joins-as official-blockchain-partner)
• McLaren Racing (https://www.mclaren.com/racing/partners/tezos/)
• New York Mets (https://news.tezoscommons.org/tezos-ecosystem-joins-n-y-mets as-new-advertising-partner-f3050e1b569b)
▪ Emergents: trading card game by an impressive team (https://www.emergents.gg/)
▪ Smartlink (escrow, DeFi, marketplace: https://www.smartlink.so/) and Vortex (DEX by
Smartlink): https://blog.smartlink.so/introducing-vortex-next-gen-amm-built-on-tezos 13ab5ee44519)
▪ Juster: Decentralized betting protocol by the Baking Bad team (https://juster.fi/)
▪ Tezos Finance: DeFi, lending (https://tezos.finance/)
News and blockchains statistics
▪ Tezos news: https://xtz.news/
▪ Blockchain activity: https://tzstats.com/ or https://tzkt.io/
▪ Transactions as it happens: https://tzflow.com/
▪ Smart contracts explorer: https://better-call.dev/stats/mainnet/general
▪ Tokens price and statistics: https://analytics.quipuswap.com/overview
▪ Node explorer: https://tezedge.com/#/network
References
10
▪ White paper (https://wiki.tezosagora.org/whitepaper/)
▪ Tezos (https://tezos.com/)
▪ Open Tezos (https://opentezos.com/)
▪ Tezos Agora (https://www.tezosagora.org/)
▪ Tezos Commons (https://tezoscommons.org/)
▪ Tezos Ukraine (https://tezos.org.ua/en)
▪ Nomadic Labs (https://www.nomadic-labs.com/)
Developer Resources
▪ First steps and general references : https://tezos.com/developer portal/ and https://opentezos.com/
▪ Michelson, Tezos smart contracts language:
o https://tezos.gitlab.io/active/michelson.html and https://tezos.gitlab.io/michelson reference/
▪ High end alternatives to Michelson: Ligo (https://ligolang.org/), SmartPy
(https://smartpy.io/), Archetype (https://archetype-lang.org/)
▪ Octez, implementation of the Tezos software by Nomadic
Labs: https://tezos.gitlab.io/index.html
This is a fantastic breakdown and I will dig deeper into it, prob grab a small bag. Has anyone here in the community taken a dive into what $sushi is doing with their, yet to launch, NFT marketplace called Shoyu? If they can pull it off, it would probably be one of the most comprehensive NFT market sites. All NFTs priced in $sushi might drive some demand for token.
I don't know about this one BTB. I've been in this space for a long time (been part of the Tezos ICO), and I think Tezos really has had a slow start (not helped by the lawsuit). Admittedly, hic etc nunc has been making some waves. Some. Every chain which hasn't blown up in price makes the same claim, Decred says they focus on development over marketing too etc.
Polkadot and Solana are far from being "copy pasta ETH". I see articles of this kind all over Messari Pro, no need for BTB to post similar articles. I come to BTB for a clear head not any shilling of L1 projects.
Solana shut down this morning for 7+ hourse: https://cryptobriefing.com/solana-intermittent-instability-arbitrum-suffers-outage/
Polkadot's parachains are still not live
It is now ser, will have problems, but the blockchain design is very good and non parasitic. Don’t forget about the Canary network in which is live and faster 7x development than DOT.
And as for Cardano's smart contract difficulties
https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/concurrency-state-cardano-c160f8c07575
as stated before, there is plenty of noise out there already.
This article causes reputational harm to BTB.
There's no mention of the early disputes amongst founding members that ultimately doomed Tezos. The project was promising, until the lawsuits:
“There has been a totally inadequate deployment of resources,” by the current foundation, said Olaf Carlson-Wee, the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency investing fund Polychain Capital, which signed on to be one of the new foundation’s seven directors. Polychain invested an undisclosed amount in last summer’s Tezos offering.
(https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-hot-coin-offerings-investors-go-shopping-for-a-new-board-a-hot-coin-offerings-investors-go-shopping-for-a-new-board-1517490000
Tezos has not "focused" on the tech to the exclusion of marketing, they have a gouche billboard, as the article noticed, in the New York Mets stadium: they're desperate. They're incompetent *both* at marketing and tech. The reason the project floundered is due to severe mismanagement by the founding team.
Claims competing chains are ALL marketing
"One thing that makes them really stand out in the broader market is the incredible amount of marketing that each network and their teams have done"
versus Tezos building foundations: "Tezos on the other hand has taken a different approach over the past 3 years and instead focused on building out a strong ecosystem that has tangible widespread use"
Just to quickly come to: tezos spending big on big brands for marketing lol
"of the many partnerships that Tezos has (for example, Red Bull Racing), the one with the New York Mets (and subsequent mainstage advertisement in the stadium each game) "
Also the other chains are quickly dismissed as ETH copy cats and end of story? lol
Please elaborate :) Haven't looked too much into the other ones, but Solana is PoS from the start and smart contracts are not even EVM
Either way, would be good to have a website to compare growth across competing chains, example https://flippening.org/ - but this one is just tracking ETH vs BTC
Happy to elaborate. Tezos, up until recent months, has had 0 marketing efforts put into the chain since its inception (go read historical posts on Tezos Reddit, it has been an extreme frustration over the past 2-3 years). Instead, they focused on building well function protocols and platforms on the network (which is a better strategy IMO, delayed gratification because the protocol and chain are well established). Now that the foundation is built, many on-chain upgrades (7 to date), with tangible growth across functioning DeFi, NFT, DAO, stablecoins, STOs, etc., Tezos is now heavily focused on marketing. That is the order of events, which has been the opposite of other mentioned chains. For example, Cardano STILL doesn't have smart contract capabilities (I have heard rumors this is coming soon, but we will see, and it is likely to see many hiccups). Cardano has been heavily marketed, and shilled by its leader Charles Hoskinson (great marketer but cannot deliver on any technical promises. He got kicked out of Ethereum Dev from what I understand). Not saying Cardano won't succeed as well, but for it to be valued at close to $100B without functioning smart contracts is silly.
Still have more to learn about Solana, but from what I understand it is extremely centralized and cannot provide smart contract call data (which is a red flag). Also I was under the impression it was EVM (but could be wrong on that). https://explorer.bitquery.io/ has data, but outside of ETH the data is inconsistent or doesn't make sense (Matic says it had 1.6B SCC in August, no way that is correct, ETH had 120M for comparison).
Appreciate the clarification.
However you only have Cardano as a bad apple, among all the competing chains.
"many on-chain upgrades (7 to date)"
Microsoft also releases a big update for Windows every few years, it's no big deal? Ethereum also had quite few upgrades in the meantime? Compare that to a SaaS which could be updated every day?
Solana is not EVM but there's a company providing a comparability bridge https://cryptobriefing.com/evm-now-compatible-with-solana-neon-labs/
Of course would be good to have more and better data at hand
Ethereum will likely take 2-3 years all in to upgrade to ETH 2.0, so no it’s not an easy thing to do when you don’t have on-chain governance built into the protocol. Also, you mentioned Microsoft and SaaS companies, which are centralized organizations. Decentralization makes it difficult to upgrade, again, google around about ETH 2.0. You’re comparing apples to oranges.
ETH2 stakers run stable right now. Are you seriously making decentralization a con, the crypto space sure has diluted ideals these days.
Decred has on-chain governance, where features activate based on votes. Not such a end-all-be-all feature as you make it.
Sure, however Eth 2.0 is the end goal, there's a variety of upgrades that have been done or are underway (I'm not counting)
Lawsuit was settled, $25M, unregistered securities sale. Put way behind them. Not related to a couple bad actors that caused board fighting early on 2017/early 2018 related to using some money for personal use (isolated and that individual/s has not been associated with Tezos since 2018). Neither have to do with their technology, adoption, growth, upgrades, marketing efforts (now), etc. now deep into 2021.
How have they not focused on tech, Tezos (as a community) has upgraded the protocol 7 times? I provided an entire article on tech and development (including various links), lol.
Marketing - they haven't focused at all on marketing up until recently, which I noted in the article and said it has come to the frustration of some in the community (so not sure what you're trying to say here). My argument is that marketing efforts now make more sense with a well developed and functioning protocol.
The lawsuit, which was left out of the article, is not a minor detail.
Tezos launched before Solana and Polkadot (ie, at least, from memory, they had a listed token before Polkadot and Tezos is an ancient project compared to Solana). At one point in time, Tezos was a top 10 coin on Coinmarketcap. Now both Polkadot and Solana are top 10 coins, and Tezos trails far behind in the 30s.
Tezos, like other early projects such as Zilliqa and EOS has essentially failed. Zilliqa was promising too. EOS was one of the few bad calls BTB made (ie, EOS was shilled in the crypto triangle investing book by BTB/WallStreetPlayboys).
Putting such high weight on "smart contract calls" as a means to measure the success of Tezos, without much context or other analysis strikes me as suspicious. Various metrics are "gamed" and faked all the time in crypto. So Tezos has started to engage in marketing -- are they perhaps inflating their stats as well? So the chain with the most smart contract calls wins?
Tezos is written in a somewhat obscure programming language called OCaml. This fact is often listed as a selling point, as the language is thought to be "academic" or "serious" or good for a variety of reasons. What do developers think of Tezos? Are they really adopting it? Do they like OCaml?
The way that Solana is lazily dismissed as a "copypasta" project, which is untrue, and without any other critique betrays the author of this article. Solana was started much later than Tezos yet quickly overtook the project on Coinmarketcap. Have you heard Anatoly Yakovenko describe his strange ideas about time and "proof of history" (https://docs.solana.com/cluster/synchronization) ? The Solana team is doing something different.
You are associating success and failure based on market valuation (LOL). I am pointing to on-chain audited metrics which shows exponential growth (in the form of SCC) from a fully functioning protocol that is NOT in testnet phase. My thesis at the end of the day is that as Tezos sees growth in SCC it will be valued at the same multiple resulting in a higher (reasonable and conservative) valuation.
Solana doesn't even have SCC data and is still in Testnet phase, so is being valued off a roadmap and white paper at ridiculously high valuations. I'm not suggesting Solana and these other projects won't exist, or won't be successful, or that they won't have good tech.
Market cap is a quick number for comparison. As you note, Solana doesn't have data on "smart contract calls" -- which I'll take your word for.
I considered Tezos, EOS, and Zilliqa to be failed projects for many reasons other than market cap.
Solana is not in "test net phase", it's not valued off a whitepaper, it's live.
I consider Cardano to be a failed project too <3, and it has a high market cap. BTB says "banks are zeros", but god, make no mistake, many of these projects are zeroes too.
Solana is ALSO a 0: https://cryptobriefing.com/solana-intermittent-instability-arbitrum-suffers-outage/
So what are your non-zeroes in the mix?
Solana is also extremely centralized and is having some big issues with NFT scams. In your comment below you said you consider Cardano to be a failed project, yet you are also arguing that market cap is a indicator of success (Cardano is valued at $77B rank 3)??
A common mistake is to evaluate a project by a single variable. A high score in a single dimension does not mean success.
Tron, at one point in time, was perhaps a top 10 project by market cap. Is Tron a good project? No.
Tezos, from the article, has rapidly increasing "smart contract calls". Does that mean it is a good project? No.
Cardano has a very high market cap in the crypto world, does that mean it is a good project? No.
Duck Unit Protocol at one point in time perhaps showed promising revenue growth, does that mean it is a good project? No.
That's why we need more sophisticated analysis =). Evaluating a project by DCF analysis, "smart contract calls", or market cap is not nearly enough.
I'd love to see a value comparison of all the major smart-contract platforms. It is difficult to continuously aggregate TPS and SCC for all the different blockchains.
Agreed, and is something that I will put together at some point.
Sorry for the late comment, but I've been into mostly fuckery for the last 3 weeks and am catching up.
First, thanks to whoever wrote this... good analysis. The way you used SCC to value the project was interesting. Stealing it.
Second, I'm heavy into SOL and won't be looking into another project. And I already dumped my small bag of Tezos earlier this year on a pump. I don't think it has the 'stuff', and the technology was underwhelming to me. Also, the protocol's incentives will work against its use short-term, IMO.
But that's just a guess. Nobody knows what is going to happen. I'll probably be wrong to some extent—only so many bags to grab though.
Thanks again.
What is the name of the discord? I was hoping to find some answers for a quipuswap error I am getting. I have set up a kukai wallet and connected it to Quipuswap, but I am getting an error when trying to swap xtz for plenty.
Error is as follows: Some of the parameters you provided are invalid and the request could not be completed. Please check your inputs and try again.
Do I need to up my slippage tolerance? Currently set at 12%.
Thanks all!
I would just trim the amount of XTZ for plenty by 1 so you're not using your full balance when making the trade, or break it up into a couple smaller trades. Should fix the problem. You don't need slippage higher than 3%.
Thanks! That was exactly the problem. Wasn’t incorporating exchange fee into the swap amount. I am now officially staking plenty as we speak!
Thanks again.
Anytime!
You've put a valuation for what Tez should be EOY. To see if worth looking at need to compare to ETH. Do you have an expected valuation for ETH?
Seems like marketing is big downside here. I can't imagine the overlap of people who care about Latin- "hit et nunc" and crypto overlap often. Have heard there's lots of good art on tezos network.
Thanks for allowing the post. It’s great to see the community contributing
When you're determining the multiple, why do you multiply smart contract calls by 100?
1000* - Otherwise the number would be a small decimal and would make it a nuisance for comparison purposes (since Market Values are in the Billions and SCC are in the millions). So it's just for optics.
This is a very well written analysis on Tezos. Never thought to look at Smart Contract Calls to value a chain. Would be great to see an analysis like this on Solana.
Thank you! And yes agreed - but most other chains data is either bad / inaccurate or doesn't exist. For example, Solana doesn't have this data available (which to me is a red flag).
Great write up! Tezos was off my radar. Looks legit
Thanks!
Somebody should do a write up on AVAX(Avalanche) too.
The most efficient and fastest blockchain I have ever seen.
Lots of dapps and now NFTs as well.
AVAX had a protocol failure back in Feb since it was unable to handle a larger inflow of volume: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/02/14/avalanche-crippled-by-bug-triggered-by-unusually-high-volume-engineer-says/
Super late response to this, but I did a similar (more visual-based) version back in April for MATIC. I was planning on doing way more work on the more qualitative value model and extending the template across chains but life got it the way.
Now that I quit my job I may restart and AVAX was always next on my list. It has been the most undervalued coin since Feb when I ran the same metrics. Crazy it took this long for people to realize the immense progress they had made, value stored on chain and pace of active address growth....
Link to MATIC report that has provides some context as well: https://leofinance.io/@stay.salty1963/can-we-bridge-the-gap-valuation-and-fair-market-crypto-price-assessment-for-the-masses
tezos is a good working product. Will look at it for defi. I like DOT too in terms of a blockchain design by having the token really being used by all holders, unlike projects that are parasitic (means raising tokens and dumping it on market for funds). It is launching and will have problems, but it will catch up. Excited for metcalfe’s Law on it. I’m not promoting DOT, just sharing my perspective in terms of blockchain design where projects not dumping funds like parasites.
Reading through the comments, I agree that Tezos has largely fallen off the radar and it is hard to envision a world where Tezos truly competes for market share with other L1s (or L2s in the case of Polygon). But none of that really matters, as you mentioned, if the usage growth is there.
I am building both a quantitative and qualitative valuation model for comparable networks that offers insight into which are trading above and below "fair market value" (which I've defined in a number of ways - mostly usage/user based, so I am really interested in where/how you are pulling the SCC metric. My first thought is that it seems like gauging the maturity of primitives and overall adoption is largely lost by that metric because it doesn't take into account size of transaction nor number of users. Please correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't the recent "growth" be driven by a small number of large players interacting with less complex (and thus costly) smart contracts?
When performing a comparable analysis, I typically start with gauging growth based on active addresses and number of number of wallets holding a balance. I then look at trading multiples against two primary metrics:
TVL (DeFi + staked value on PoS chains) - I realize the weaknesses in this metric but it ends up being negligable in comparison to the wildly diverse multiples that emerge.
Transfer Volume - meaning value of Trezos (I don't like using the using the phrase "transaction volume" here because it is mistaken as trading volume.
Their are a number of other metrics I look at, but to me, there are no others that adequately reveal existing operational utility, growth prospects, and value accumulation. TVL, even though not completely accurate, establishes a baseline figure for network value.
Using these metrics, I immediately realized how grossly undervalued MATIC and AVAX were 9mo ago against their competitors and went all in. Now that the space is more populated/up and running, I performed the same multiple comparison a month ago and found not much had changed apart from AVAX being even more undervalued...although it's far more in line at this point in time :)
Long story short, I would love incorporate SCC into my assessment, but would be interested to get your perspective on what it actually indicates and how it might be misleading.
I think it could be the opposite, given the spike in interest of NFTs on Tezos, so therefore large number of small players interacting with smart contracts.
By transfer volume, do you mean transaction volume on the network (and as you said, not trading volume)? Tezos is close to 50% of Ethereum's TV, so curious how that would look based on your model.
Would love to chat with you further, could you DM me on Twitter? @bowtiedtruther
Yea absolutely. Would love to know where you are pulling the data. And yes, sorry forgot to include that after the () part. Value of all on chain transactions per day.
Also forgot to thank you for this post. Need more discussion (and subsequent debates) on fundamentals in this ecosystem and how we can make data-driven valuation assessments based on on-chain data. I will shoot you a dm :)
Of course! Also, I'm still interested in catching up more so shoot me a DM!
I don't think I can without you following me because I've been following you for a bit and tried the other day. Mine is @stay_salty1963