Ctez Official Launch

Talks of ctez date back to the original forum post made by Arthur Breitman in January of this year. Ctez ideation intended for ctez to be a Tezos public good, allowing holders of tez to choose who to delegate their to and participate in Tezos DeFi simultaneously.

3 min readOct 25, 2021

In early August 2021, Hugo Renaudin, CEO at Bender Labs, announced the implementation of ctez was being developed by the team at Bender Labs and Plenty DeFi.

After months of hard work, Bender Labs and Plenty DeFi are proud to announce that ctez is now officially live! Any tez holder can open their own oven and mint ctez on the ctez app and use ctez across Tezos DeFi Protocols.

ctez, a mini primer

Tezos is a Liquid Proof of Stake blockchain meaning funds held in wallet addresses and smart contract addresses can be delegated to “bakers”; nodes responsible for validating transactions on Tezos.

Considering recent growth across the Tezos ecosystem, an increasing amount of funds are locked in smart contract addresses as tez holders participate in DeFi protocols and stake their tez.

Whenever tez is staked in a tezos smart contract, the question: “Who is baking that tez?”, i.e. which baker is the tez locked in the smart contract being delegated to, has become an inevitable one.

The launch of ctez solves this issue by issuing a synthetic collateralized version of tez; ctez, to any tez holder willing to stake their tez in an “oven”. The tez stake serves as collateral to ctez, which tez holders can mint after they stake. The minted ctez can then be used across Tezos DeFi while the tez locked in the oven is baked by the holder’s desired baker.

ctez is a Tezos public good, it follows a completely mechanical transparent process and is free of fees and any intermediary transactions!

The ctez app allows tez holders to:

Create an oven to stake tez in an oven along with anyone they choose to whitelist
Mint a corresponding amount of ctez
Provide liquidity to the ctez/tez liquidity pool
Swap tez of ctez

Bender Labs and Plenty’s role

From the code originally proposed by Arthur Breitman, Bender Labs and Plenty DeFi, two integral components of Tezos DeFi, collaborated to implement ctez and bring a simple, easy to use interface for tez holders to mint ctez.

“We’re super proud to launch ctez as a community project, especially working alongside a stellar team like Plenty. We’ve been working together with Bernd, Om and their team to make sure we build the best tool and experience for Tezos users. The success of Tezos DeFi is dependent on the collaboration of different protocols, and we’re thrilled to be able to walk the talk.”
Hugo Renaudin, CEO at Bender Labs

“Collaboration is essential for growing, improving and expanding the young Tezos ecosystem we are all part of. Working together with the team at Bender Labs has been a blast, and they set an example for the entire blockchain ecosystem on how sharing best practices and brainstorming together can give epic results.”
Bernd Oostrum, co-founder Plenty

Bender Labs and Plenty are proud to release this essential building block and increase utility and composability on Tezos DeFi!

Closing

The integration of ctez across Tezos protocols will allow tez holders to delegate their own tez directly without missing out on opportunities in DeFi.

For those interested in the technical specifics related to ctez, the documentation is available to all!

The code to ctez is also open source and available on Github!