Papa John’s Use The Tezos Blockchain To Give Away Free NFT

March 07, 2022 Harry DeVries 0 Comments


Papa John's NFT Bag Giveaway
Papa John's is using the Tezos blockchain to give away free NFT bags designed by two talented NFT designers; Tom Hoff and Ash Sketch. One lucky winner given the chance to with a real-life version. The NFTs can be claimed here.

There are nine NFT bags from 19,840 to choose from and claiming a bag enters the owner into a draw to win a collectible real-life Papa John's bag, with the winner being chosen on the 14th April 2022. This will be the 'Papa 1984' yellow bag, by Ash Sketch.

The bag is worth £250 and users are able to mint one NFT bag per wallet in order to enter the draw.

Papa John's is the fourth-largest pizza delivery restaurant chain in the United States, operating over 5000 restaurant locations worldwide. The pizza bag giveaway will represent the company's first foray into the NFT market and for this they chose to utilize the environmentally friendly Tezos blockchain in order to distribute the offering.
Papa John's stated:

Most Proof of Work blockchains are very inefficient and wasteful by design. They can use millions of times more energy than modern Proof of Stake blockchains like Tezos. By comparison, creating and trading NFTs on Tezos takes around the same amount of energy as sending an email or a social media post.

Last year big rival Pizza Hut entered the NFT market with their pizza art NFT offering.

People will be able to buy the real-life versions of these bags in an exclusive drop of five real Papa 1984, Papa Cheese Melt and Papa Tag bags which will go on sale via Depop, the fashion marketplace, on 7 March 2022. 

Payvo is Coming - ARK.io

March 04, 2022 Harry DeVries 0 Comments



Payvo is coming, and it is going to be our best wallet yet! Read on to find out everything that has changed since our last update, including the transition from a desktop app to a fully web-based application. There is a lot to cover, so let's get straight into it!

#Payvo is Now 100% Web-Based
When we set out to build a next-gen wallet, we had a few key goals in mind:

  1. Payvo needs to be the best white label out-of-the-box solution possible.
  2. Payvo needs to easily integrate with any ARK-based network.
  3. Payvo needs to be user and developer friendly while featuring the intuitive interfaces we have become known for.
  4. Payvo needs to be modern and future-proof.
  5. If you have spent any time with Web3, then you are probably familiar with the major shift towards web-based interfaces for both DeFi and wallet management. The truth is, desktop applications are outdated, so we need to make sure that we keep up with industry standards and trends. There are a lot of benefits with a move towards a web-based application, so let's take a look at a couple of the most important ones.

#Payvo Will Always be Up-to-Date
One of the most frequent support emails we get is that someone cannot see their funds, or they stopped receiving rewards from their delegate, or that their wallet is, in some way, failing to properly update the network data. In almost all cases, the solution is to update the wallet to the latest version.

With Payvo, you will always be up-to-date, meaning you will no longer have to worry whether you have the most recent version or not—it will just work. Period.

This also means that it is easier for us to push regular updates and make changes without disrupting you as the user. This leads to a better development cycle and an ability to create a more seamless interface for the end user.

#One App, Multiple Operating Systems
With the shift to a web-based application, Payvo will effectively become 'one-size-fits-all.' Whether you are on a desktop, laptop, iPad, or mobile phone, Payvo will provide a unified experience across all of your devices. Simply access the URL, and you are off to the races!

This greatly benefits developers who no longer need to maintain multiple codebases or submit to Apple or Google for approval of the mobile app. This greatly reduces the time required to get your fork up and running and makes maintenance easy.

Not only that, but the web-based application eliminates some of the restrictions caused by the previous use of Electron. This will make some features more efficient and easier to work with (such as web workers). Payvo also loads faster, runs smoother, and generally provides a better experience for both users and developers.

#White Label and Built for ARK
The shift to a web-based application is merely one of the only major changes with Payvo. We have spent a lot of time looking at our goals as a company and have put significant effort into getting back to basics. While we originally envisioned Payvo as a multi-wallet that would support BTC, Ethereum, and other assets, we feel like we need to stay squarely focused on providing the best possible solution for the ARK Ecosystem and those who fork the ARK Blockchain Framework.

As such, our goal is to make Payvo the best possible white-label solution for ARK Based networks and focus on making it plug-and-play within the ecosystem. With this change, we will also be moving away from running 'Live Service' applications directly from the ARK Ecosystem, SCIC. Everything that we build will be freely available as open-source software for anyone to run. We do not want to be the single point of failure nor pick and choose which networks matter the most. We love all of our bridgechains and want to give each and every one of them the opportunity to provide a robust application suite and set of features to their communities.

All we ask is that you leave the license in place, give us credit where credit is due, and if you get famous, give us a shout and let us know all the cool stuff you are doing!

#So When Can We Use Payvo?
We expect to have a public beta version available within the first half of March. The beta version will be fully functional and support the following features:

Fully Customizable Networks - Decide which networks you want to see inside the wallet as well as those you don't want to interact with.
Custom Networks - Add any v2.7+ Core-based network to the Payvo Wallet by providing a valid node address.
Server Management - Add your own custom nodes for interacting and/or broadcasting transactions. You are in full control (if you want to be).
Swap Integration - Payvo will come with built-in integration for both ChangeNow and Changelly at launch.
News Feed - Payvo will feature a news feed powered by FTX (previously Blockfolio) for relevant (listed) networks (only ARK at launch).
We could not be more excited to get Payvo into your hands. We believe these changes make for the best wallet we have ever produced and will provide for a more robust, futureproof white label solution for ARK Based Blockchains. Stay tuned to our blog so you do not miss out on the upcoming Beta. We cannot wait to hear all your feedback!

Tezos Records Highest Number Of Contract Calls In January With Several Dapps Set To Launch

March 01, 2022 Harry DeVries 0 Comments



A Smart Contract Call Record
Contract calls are interactions with smart contracts in the form of transactions. This is an important metric to see growth in the adoption rate of mainnet smart contracts. Since July 2020, the amount of contract calls has increased to 1,209% of the July total.

Every month we've seen a new record in the number of contract calls (except for November, which had a 10% drop).

January saw a 22% increase compared to December. At 22% it sounds ok, but if put this growth into perspective, we see that that 22% is 2.2 times the total amount of contract calls in July last year. We're witnessing exponential growth.

If we're looking at developer activity, we also continue to see growth in activity. In December, we saw an average of 700 daily new deployments on testnets. But in January, we see an average of 930 daily new deployments.

February is set to bring a lot of new launches and milestones.

Edo
The latest protocol upgrade will go live on mainnet in the second week of February. This is a feature-packed upgrade that includes privacy features.

This means that developers can easily integrate privacy into their smart contracts, which will enable them to provide private transactions and develop "privacy-conscious" applications.

Edo also introduces Tickets. Tickets is a convenient mechanism for smart contracts to grant portable permissions to other smart contracts or to issue tokens.

Tickets will be improving challenges like concurrency, which is a general issue developers face, especially in decentralized smart contract platforms.

Tickets also enable a more efficient way of interacting between contracts. It will enable self-custody of first-class coins/token permissions and improve the developer experience.

These are just a few of the advantages Tickets will bring and you can read more about tickets here.

Kalamint
Kalamint is a platform that can be used to create, sell and collect NFT's. Besides the advantage of low Tezos fees over high fees on Ethereum-based NFT platforms, Kalamint will have a unique governance design that includes a Guild.

We'll do an extensive article on Kalamint before they launch the platform on the 18th of February.

TEZEX
TEZEX is a cross-chain gateway to Tezos. It will enable value to come from Ethereum to Tezos DeFi in a few clicks. After that, users can move away from the current fees on Ethereum, and experience a drop in costs that is on average 3,000 times cheaper on Tezos.

When TEZEX launches, another crucial instrument joins the Tezos DeFi landscape.

Quipuswap
This is the second Decentralized Exchange (DEX) that is built on Tezos. Chances are that it will launch in February. This does, however, depend on the progress of the external audit of Quipuswap.

Kolibri
Kolibri is an algorithmic stable coin, built on Tezos and backed by XTZ. A February launch of Kolibri could be a bit optimistic to expect, but a testnet was released in the beginning of January, so there has some significant progress.

1,000,000 accounts
In February, Tezos will quite likely reach the milestone of 1,000,000 funded accounts.

With currently 945,284 funded accounts, and  97,253 new funded accounts in the past 30 days, ~55,000 account are likely to get created this month and break the 1 millionth milestone.

Reinstating Smartphone Access with Lisk Mobile v2.0.0

March 01, 2022 Harry DeVries 0 Comments



On the 21st of August 2021, we migrated the Lisk Mainnet to v3 which introduced numerous improvements to Lisk, such as multisignature accounts, a new address system, a new DPoS consensus algorithm, and a dynamic fee system. In order to meet internal deadlines, we had to focus our development resources on delivering these new improvements. This resulted in moving all frontend development resources to Lisk Desktop, hence compromising the availability of Lisk Mobile on launch day.

Today, we are proud to announce the release of Lisk Mobile v2.0.0 which reintroduces the core feature of Lisk on smartphones. Namely, the convenient sending and receiving of transactions. More advanced features like voting or multisignature accounts are solely available on Lisk Desktop to give our community the easiest and most user friendly experience on their mobile devices.

The next release will be Lisk Mobile v3.0.0, and will provide access to the Lisk interoperability solution which marks the launch of the Lisk blockchain application platform later this year.

New Features in Detail
Lisk Mobile v2.0.0 focuses on four topics, the access to Lisk v3 and its various new features, user experience and design improvements, Bitcoin support removal, and finally the overall security enhancements.

Access to Lisk v3
The recent major update of our Mainnet to Lisk v3 brought a wide range of new features and improvements to Lisk. From improved scalability to much lower fees, including a more decentralized DPoS blockchain and network, to a completely secure address system. In fact, as these are such major improvements it is highly recommended to view our announcement blog post of the Lisk Mainnet v3 migration, also please make sure to read the linked articles.

Internally, Lisk Mobile has a special focus. To be the most accessible wallet for the Lisk ecosystem. Taking that into consideration we have purposely limited the available feature-set solely for the sending and receiving of transactions.

User Experience and Design Improvements
Since releasing the previous Lisk Mobile we have been busy collecting community feedback to enhance and improve it even further. With Lisk Mobile v2.0.0 we focused on delivering many improvements to make its usage even easier and more convenient, as well as more consistent with our brand as can be seen in the images below.

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