What we’ve learned from Tezos baking survey

“Baking some 100% Whole Grain Bread” by Chiot’s Run is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

We launched a Tezos baking survey in the beginning of November. We deeply appreciate everyone’s participation — it is extremely helpful to have this kind of insight. At this time we have 122 responses from the community and it’s time to look at some outcomes.

First, a little about survey structure.

The first question of the survey divided respondents into 5 groups:

1. I bake
2. I delegate
3. I hold tez, but neither bake nor delegate
4. I used to bake, but now delegate
5. I used to bake, but now neither bake nor delegate

Based on the response given a different set of follow up questions was presented. None of the questions were mandatory except the first one.

Delegation

44.1% of participants said they are currently delegating — both those who baked in the past (3.3%) and those who never did (40.8%).

We asked participants what makes them delegate rather than bake themselves.

This is how the responses fell into groups:

If you keep your funds with an exchange like Coinbase, they make it easy to delegate and provide documentation for taxing/accounting purposes.

Delegating/accounting becomes not so easy when you don’t act through an exchange, it requires certain effort and research. However delegating is still perceived to be easier than setting up a baking solution.

Baking

45.8% of participants said they participated in baking. 41.7% currently participate and 4.1% used to bake, but no longer do so.

Baking solution

We asked people about their most recent baking solution and got the following distribution:

As building from source prevails with 61.1%, it would be an interesting question why it is so. There may be a few suggestions — from the fact that this is the most promoted and talked about solution to the trust factor for any other solution that is not core tezos itself. Nevertheless the other solutions have some share of users:

Kiln — 16.7%

Tezos packaging — 13%

Baking Buddy — 3.7%

Precompiled binaries — 1.9%

BakinBacon — 1.9%

Docker — 1.9%

Using precompiled binaries or the docker distribution saves time and avoids complexities of building from source, but still requires a good understanding of all the moving parts in Tezos and how to put them together.

tezos-packaging is something of a middle ground between DIY and all-in-one GUI solutions, although it’s closer to the latter as it provides a terminal-based setup wizard, automates updates and supports all key management approaches that Octez supports.

The rest of the three solutions have a GUI and are aimed at bakers who don’t want to get too deep in the weeds. Kiln is an older, established one, the other two are emerging products. Good to see we have more baking options.

Baking infrastructure

When we asked what infrastructure people use the responses were distributed as follows:

It is understandable that a home computer (with or without backup) is the most accessible solution as it does not require additional investment to start baking. Combined the home computer approach made up 70.9% of responses. Cloud solutions and professional servers come into the picture for bakers that have a lot of tez and/or bake for others. In this case running a baker in a more professional setting becomes economically justified, making up 25.4% of responses. Raspberry Pi (3.6%) is an interesting option. Either as a primary solution or as a backup it is not a huge investment and we can see more adoption of such solutions in the future if Octez will continue to support such hardware.

Key management

The vast majority of respondents (80%) use Ledger devices as their key management solution. It is the most accessible and affordable option for bakers and as far as security goes, people feel safer using hardware encryption. However, software encryption is the second most popular option (16.4%) as for those that understand how to set up software encryption it is a much more flexible solution that allows usage of cloud setup/remote infrastructure. Third option — HSM (3.6%) — can be expensive (though some are not, as amazon now offers hsm solution as low as $1/month), but also is tied to your current infrastructure solution, that lessens the flexibility should you want to explore a different one.

Interestingly enough, even though the overwhelming majority of home computer setup was using ledger (91.9%), for the rest there was no immediate winner in a configuration.

Baking for others

Majority of responders (51.9%) said they did not bake for others.

For others we asked what was their major pain point. Payout scripts (34.6%) and Reliability (30.8%) were the major issues people named. While the reliability question (as well as infrastructure) is something that the bakers can resolve by themselves, there is definitely a demand for an easier payout solution.

Voting

We asked how participants vote and how they know it’s time. Not surprisingly, almost all of those who have Kiln as their baking solution also vote with it (88.9%). The rest use CLI.

As far as voting with CLI goes, it is a one line command and theoretically it’s easy, however, you

1. Need to know this line
2. Need to know the proposal hash
3. Need to know it’s time to vote

Unlike the first step, the other two are not “learn once use forever” information, so how do people know it’s time?

A lot of people said they are actively involved in the community and monitor multiple channels.

Monitoring

When it comes to knowing how the baking goes, the winner by far is Tezos Notifier Telegram bot (51.6%). The next in popularity are custom scripts/solutions people come up with (14.5%). Often respondents use more than one tool for monitoring at a time. Kiln users receive Kiln notifications (12.9%), but none of the respondents used Kiln for monitoring purposes only.

Pyrometer and explorers (tzkt.io, tzstats.io) share fourth place (8.1%). Finally, a few people mentioned Tom Knudsen’s tools and Bake Buddy.

Community preferences

We asked some questions that touched on the subjects of operating systems of choice, importance of graphic user interface, proficiency with command line, modular approach to the baking solution.

On operating system preference a majority voted for Linux:

The importance of GUI usage distributed somewhat equally:

Level of mastery with command line skewed towards high proficiency, when we asked how comfortable the respondents are with CLI, the answers distributed as follows:

67.3% of the respondents would like to have a payout script as a part of the baking solution.

90.9% of the respondents did not object to the modular baking solution.

The interesting thing to note here is that the answers reflect the preferences and skills of the bakers’ community as it is now. There may be two things to consider looking at this — first is how to make things better for those who are already bakers and second is how to make baking attractive to someone who is currently not a majority in the baking community.

Former bakers

We asked those who no longer bake (4.1%) why they decided to stop baking.

The sample size is not large for this group, so it makes more sense to look at the reasons themselves rather than distribution. The same themes we saw in the reasons for delegation pop up here as well.

Tez holders that neither bake nor delegate

13.1% of respondents said they hold tez, but neither bake nor delegate. We asked them what the main reason was. The answers fall into the following categories:

The people who don’t want to bake or delegate stated as concerns funds liquidity, unreasonable fees for delegation, lack of staking options.

Major pain points, concerns and aspirations

We asked bakers and community members what their pain points were and what can be done to make baking better. As the answers were free-form, they are not easily turned into a chart with percentages, however here are a few important themes when it comes to major pain points:

1. Concerns regarding tedious upgrades, knowing which version is stable.
2. Running out of memory, troubleshooting, re-installing.
3. Kiln issues
4. Ledger Nano S issues
5. Missing endorsements/bakes for no apparent reason
6. General amount of maintenance required to run a baker, especially when baking for others.

We also got a good amount of responses on what people would want — the question was opened to all participants, not just bakers and about ⅔ of responders had something to say.

There are also common themes:

1. Seamless updates
2. Better payout scripts
3. Stable solution that does not require a lot of maintenance
4. Transparency on missed endorsements/bakes
5. Solution that has lower hardware requirements
6. GUI interface for baking/monitoring
7. Availability on all platforms
8. Resolving overdelegation/introduce controls on accepting delegations
9. Lower barrier for baking (decreasing roll size)

The issues raised and features requested are useful additions to the list of requirements for those projects that have a baking solution for Tezos in their sights. Many thanks again to all those who took time to participate in the survey.