Introducing Tezos Spotlight

Welcome to Tezos Spotlight! Each week, we’ll highlight a team or project in the Tezos ecosystem. To kick off Tezos Spotlight, we decided to talk to two of our own team members, TQ Tezos President and Founder Alison Mangiero and Research Engineer Eli Guenzburger. We hope you enjoy!

What is the idea behind this weekly spotlight?

The Tezos Spotlight is designed to introduce new teams working on Tezos and highlight the exciting projects they’re working on. We want to hear from ecosystem members in their own words what they’re doing to drive the Tezos project forward. There are so many talented people and teams within the ecosystem that we want to highlight both to build camaraderie within the community and to find synergies between different projects.

What is TQ Tezos focused on right now?

We’re focused on bringing Tezos to the next level in 2021, and building the capabilities needed to make it the blockchain of choice in a number of key verticals. We’re especially excited about a new wave of opportunities in gaming, the creator economy, asset tokenization, and more.

This means not just building the infrastructure to make Tezos the premier blockchain from a technology perspective, it also means identifying new and creative ways to promote the project whether through traditional media, social media, virtual events or stronger global coordination on project and product rollout.

Anything that you’re particularly excited about?

We have a ton of exciting new initiatives and products coming down the pipeline, but we’re particularly looking forward to rolling out HomeBase, a platform for community members and developers to create and launch their own DAOs on Tezos based on a DAO framework called BaseDAO. More on this very soon!

We’re also excited about all the work we’re doing in coordination with teams across the ecosystem to build more widespread awareness of Tezos and all the incredible work that’s being done.

Speaking of exciting developments, one of the features included in Edo is tickets. Eli — can you give us an overview of tickets?

Tickets provide a convenient mechanism for smart contracts to grant portable permissions or issue tokens without requiring the token holder or permission grantee to interact with a centralized contract.

At its core, a ticket is a way for a smart contract to authenticate data with respect to a Tezos address. It is impossible for a contract to “forge” a ticket by creating one that appears to have been created by a different address, or duplicate an existing ticket using the DUP instruction.

What about a demo?

I recently published “Tickets on Tezos — Part 1” on the TQ Tezos blog, which features a summary of tickets alongside a demo of auctioning an NFT using tickets.

Why are tickets a noteworthy feature? What sort of use cases do you see popping up?

In a way, the relationship between ticket based assets and traditional Tezos assets (FA1.2, FA2) is comparable to the relationship between cash and money in a bank account. When someone purchases a cup of coffee with a debit card, the coffee shop must communicate with the bank and ask them to subtract the price of the coffee from the customer’s account and transfer it to the coffee shop’s account. Similarly, transferring some FA2 token to an address means users must make a call to the FA2 contract asking it to execute the transfer.

But with tickets, users can send ticket-based assets directly from their wallets to the wallets of other users wallets or contracts, without communicating with the originating contract as they would need to with traditional FA2s. The receiver of a ticket can know with certainty who created it, as tickets are non-forgeable, like physical money.

In terms of use cases, tickets are perfectly suited for representing assets, fungible or non-fungible, for which users are in full control of their tokens (as opposed to permissioned assets). They make it especially easy to create NFTs and auction them off without having to maintain maps of ownership or requiring purchasers to interact with a centralized contract to manage their NFT. In my demo in the blogpost linked above, I explore using tickets to create and auction off NFTs. Tickets can also be used to grant permissions and could simplify signing procedures as in multisig transactions.