Plenty Community Call #13: Discussing the Security of Tezos, Naan, and Liquidity
On Saturday, the Plenty DeFi team held a Twitter call. There were blockchain developers, NFT artists, active members of Tezos ecosystem and Tezos Ukraine's community manager Olya Rymar. We discussed a lot of interesting topics: NFTs, Tezos security, rookie problems, and the TVL bloat. In this post, we recap the most interesting points.
Those willing to find out more are thus encouraged to check out the full call with Twitter Plenty DeFi. The team added timestamps to make navigation easier.
Why the Auction House VerticalCrypto Moved to Tezos
VerticalCrypto started its way into NFT with Ethereum. The spokesperson for the auction house noted that previously the community of this blockchain loved art. But when famous PFP projects appeared, speculators squeezed artists out. The spokesperson thinks it’s a logical way to develop art, but it didn’t work for her personally.
VerticalCrypto began to look for alternatives and in 2021 switched to Tezos thanks to the artists who mined on Hic et Nunc. The team liked the fact that the Tezos NFT ecosystem remained art-focused, open to the community, and not too speculative. Even as the NFT market has grown in volume, artists continue to make art, not money.
The Security of Tezos
In 2022, there is news about another bridge or an EVM blockchain application being hacked almost every week. At Tezos, we know of only one such incident: a white-hat hacker manipulated the price of the kUSD/XTZ liquidity pool, bought the collateral of large kUSD ovens for almost nought and made a profit of $2.5 million. Fortunately, he returned the money the next day, and the Kolibri Finance team closed this attack vector.
One of Tezos’ security features is formal code verification, that is, obtaining proof that the contract with any incoming data will work the way the developer intended. Still, Mavryk Finance noted that no Tezos project actually uses formal verification of contracts, because it is complicated and expensive.
At the same time, the developers note the Ligo programming language is much more secure than Solidity and other popular languages. But there are problems here, too: Ligo is not as popular as Rust, and developers are harder to train. VerticalCrypto agreed that finding Tezos blockchain developers is a challenge in its own right.
Updates for Naan
What makes Naan better than other wallets like Kukai? The obvious answer is that it’s mobile and supports all the features you need: transactions, NFT browsing, and working with Tezos apps in a built-in browser.
Naan can also be used with desktop applications: when you connect the wallet in the application you have to choose any mobile wallet or the Beacon option, open Naan, and scan the QR code in the application.
Naan has a few other features:
- An Events tab where announcements of interesting events in Tezos appear;
- Viewing other people’s NFT collections: you add your wallet address and check out the NFTs.
The Naan team is now working on the next version of the wallet. Naan will probably also appear on desktops as a plugin or web wallet. It will also acquire the functionality of creating a wallet through a social media account. The purpose of such changes is to lower the entry threshold to blockchain and NFT and attract more users.
Naan developers also want to implement an option to buy NFT for USDT, any other token, or even with a card. This will be useful for events and exhibitions, so visitors can buy works even if they don’t have XTZ.
TVL Problem
Projects on other blockchains, notably Solana, deliberately inflate their own volumes. For example, the Macalinao brothers built multiple DeFi protocols one on top of the other so that DeFi browsers would count one dollar at a time and show an inflated value of blockchain funds (TVL).
Plenty, for the sake of experimentation, tested whether volumes on Tezos could be inflated in a similar way. According to Bernd, with a few smart contracts and tricks, you can easily make fake volumes and get TVL of several billion that would show up in TVL aggregators like DefiLlama. However, DeFi projects on Tezos work honestly and rely on organic user and volume growth.
Still, there is a big problem with DeFi on Tezos: the lack of liquidity. It’s good that Tezos is used by a lot of talented artists, but it would be better if a few whales joined them and started using DeFi.
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