Decathlon
Decathlon is a French sporting retail giant with 2080 stores in 56 countries. In 2020, they generated $11.4 billion in revenue and have close to 100,000 employees.

In 1976 the first Decathlon store was opened in Lille by Michel Leclercq, France, now it is known as the largest sporting goods retailer worldwide.

Séan Garnier
Séan Garnier is a French freestyle footballer. He is a two-time Football Freestyle World Champion, a three-time French champion, a Red Bull athlete, Urbanball Ambassador and Founder and member of S3 crew.

He a very large social following with over 3.74 million YouTube subscribers and over 5.4 million Instagram followers.

Tezos Technology Used In The Decathlon X Séan Garnier Street Football Boots
Now, it has been announced that Tezos technology has been used in the Decathlon X Séan Garnier Street Football Boots product line in order to provide an NFT experience.

The collaboration has been done with the help and support of Nomadic Labs.

The football boots come with an attached NFT 'Golden Ticket' which is said to: 'give access to new personalized and exclusive experiences with the world champion… a golden ticket that extends the experience!'

On the Golden Ticket NFT experience Decathlon stated:

'This is the first step in building a future where digital goods are connected to physical goods.'

This suggests that more utilization of Tezos blockchain technology will accompany Decathlon products in the future.

Ithaca 2 Activates And The Tenderbake Consensus Algorithm Is Now Live
'Ithaca 2' – the ninth Tezos core protocol upgrade has been activated and this upgrade switches out the Tezos consensus algorithm from Emmy* to Tenderbake.

This means that the consensus algorithm has changed from being a Nakamoto style algorithm (Emmy*), to a BFT-style algorithm (Tenderbake).

This upgrade lowers block times, delivers faster finality, and has the potential to be optimized further down the line to deliver advanced scaling solutions.

It's been a long journey towards Tenderbake activation for the Tezos community and now it has recently happened with Ithaca 2.

The first research paper on Tenderbake was submitted in early 2020. This research paper included notable people and organizations such as CEA List, Université Paris-Saclay, and Nomadic Labs among others.

CEA List, who are part of the CEA, otherwise known as the French Alternative Energies And Atomic Energy Commission. The French Alternative Energies And Atomic Energy Commission have an annual budget of €5 billion and have over 20,000 employees.

In April 2021, Tenderbake was launched on testnet.

In early 2022 Tenderbake could have also been activated in 'Ithaca 1', however that amendment upgrade did not quite secure enough of a supermajority to push it over the line.

Now, Tenderbake has been activated with the Ithaca 2 core protocol amendment upgrade on the 1st of April 2022.

Summarized optimizations included in Ithaca 2:

Lower blocktimes and improved finality.

Faster transactions.

Smoother running applications.

Preparation for scaling solutions including transaction and smart contract optimistic rollups (expected to be enshrined into the blockchain itself), and enabling WASM and EVM compatibility.

Reducing the requirement to become a network validator ("baker") by 25% from 8,000 tez to 6,000 tez, strengthening the decentralized nature of Tezos.

The GrantShares DAO is launching on Neo N3 to distribute funding to grassroots developers and ecosystem beneficial projects. The DAO will manage an initial treasury funded by the Neo Foundation.

As the first DAO to launch on Neo N3, GrantShares is designed to provide financial support to smaller initiatives that do not currently fit the scope of Neo's existing grant programs. Voting members of the organization include COZ, AxLabs, Red4Sec, NGD Enterprise, NeoResearch, NEXT, Neo SPCC, Neo Foundation, Neo Global Development, and Neo News Today.

Anyone is encouraged to submit a proposal for the members of the DAO to discuss and vote.

The initial funding limit for GrantShares is $50,000 per proposal, and can be used to fund local events, dApps, developer tools, education initiatives, and more. Projects seeking larger amounts should apply for grants through one of Neo's Eco Support tracks.

The DAO's smart contracts are developed and maintained by AxLabs and have already been deployed to the Neo MainNet. In the coming weeks, AxLabs aims to release the accompanying dApp for applicants to submit proposals. The dApp will create an issue in the GrantShares repository where DAO members can discuss the potential grantee's proposal before voting.

In addition to distributing funding, AxLabs designed the GrantShares smart contracts to serve as a reference implementation for other N3 developers. The DAO contracts are open-source on the GrantShares repository.

The GrantShares dApp is tentatively expected to launch in mid-April 2022.

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, 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!

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.

Neo community developer Robert Oschler has won second place in the SocialFi category of the Metaverse Alliance hackathon. Oschler's project, Neo3D Live, is a 3D metaverse world that allows users to interact with one another's avatars and participate in events like real-time auctions.

Oschler developed Neo3D Live so that anyone in any part of the world can access the 3D world, regardless of their ability to purchase powerful equipment. Neo3D Live was designed for most of the world's internet users – those without VR headsets or high-end equipment. He said:

Let Metaverse residents form meaningful connections in a virtual world that will run on common hardware, including the millions of smartphones that may be the only link to the Metaverse a citizen in an economically disadvantaged region has. This is a link that has the true power to uplift the millions, if not billions of hard-working, intelligent, decent human beings who have the misfortune of being born in a region that is not economically gifted like other parts of the world.

The platform leverages the ThreeJS graphics library, a graphics engine that is widely accessible. Neo3D Live runs on almost any browser and device, so there is no need for high-powered computer setups.

The platform's beta version allows users to congregate in a digital 3D environment. Real-time video conferencing is embedded into the moveable characters, so participants can see those they're communicating with via live video feed. Oschler said, "By combining true video conferencing where participants can see each other's faces as they talk to one another and move about a fun virtual world, people can once again feel the natural human joy of forming groups based on both social and spatial relationships like they would at a party or a shopping mall."

Oschler also incorporated other elements to make the space feel more natural and interactive. In Neo3D Live, intelligent objects are embedded in the virtual world, responding to an avatar's presence. For example, walking up to a wall with an embedded YouTube video will trigger the video to begin playing. And to create a more real-life experience, a user can hear the sounds of their movements and that of others around them.

NFT Showcase
The first demo of Neo3D Live included the NFT Showcase, a custom room where an individual can purchase an NFT on auction. A demonstration of the live auction can be found below:

The NFT designer can determine who can participate in the Showcase by whitelisting public wallet addresses on Neo N3.

The Neo3D Live smart contract supports derivative commissions, so collectors can earn profits when they sell an artist's NFTs if the artist grants them that right. Further, Oschler intends the NFTs bought and sold through Neo3D Live to be viewable and transferable via third-party marketplaces (i.e., Sky Hut, GhostMarket).

Looking forward, he aims to develop and release a drag-and-drop toolkit (that doesn't require coding ability), so anyone can build a virtual world.