Tezos: Deep analysis of Emmy+, ConseilJS beta 0.2.7 is out, Michelson updates, Huobi Wallet Be ‘Baking’ Tezos, Kiln Release v0.6.0

Paradigm

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Paradigm

11 min readAug 1, 2019

Biweekly update 18th July — 1st August

Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com

Here we go again! Welcome to our update on Tezos — these two weeks were extremely fruitful for the company. Developers toiled on analyzing Emmy+, an improvement of the current consensus algorithm used by Tezos that will be included in their next proposal. Analysis suggests that, in the model of Emmy+, selfish baking is not profitable, even when the baker attempting it has more than 45% of the stake. Michelson was enhanced: now the smart contracts support entry points, comparable types are currently closed under products (i.e., the pair constructor), a new instruction, CHAIN_ID, allows contracts to differentiate between the test chain and the leading network and a lot more! Tezos Commons released an explainer video that breaks down why Tezos is the best platform for security tokens. TzStats pushed out the first development update tackling the Tezos data trail. tezblock released the results from their user feedback calls and survey. Tezos Korea announced a new training program to take place in Busan. An original grantee, CamlCase Tech, announced that they are building a Uniswap inspired decentralized exchange on Tezos called Dexter. By the way, hot news appeared — the wallet provided by cryptocurrency exchange Huobi will support Tezos (XTZ) native tokens and baking.
Moreover, teams that work separately, but towards the main goal have been socially active over the period. Tezos Israel, with the support of Chain Accelerator and Nomadic Labs, held a Training blockchain in Tel Aviv to raise awareness of Tezos across Israel and explain blockchain technology by educating students and the general audience. Besides, SimpleStaking and TulipToolsOU received grants to continue to build and improve the development environment for Tezos. The Tezos community turned into a group of loyal people, lively discussing news, taking part in events, and supporting the company all the way. The level of engagement in social networks is extremely high. Watch Tezos Progress, Stay with Paradigm, Feel Like a Million Dollars!

Development

For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.

Deep analysis of Emmy+, an improvement of the current consensus algorithm used by Tezos that will be included in the next proposal. Analysis suggests that, for a freshly injected operation, and making no assumption on the health of the chain, 6, 12, and 44 block confirmations are recommended, assuming an attacker with a stake of 20%, 30%, and respectively 40% of the total stake. (The statement is not absolute, but instead relative to the security criterion.) The analysis also shows that, in the model of Emmy+, selfish baking is not profitable, even when the baker attempting it has more than 45% of the stake.

Get acquainted with:

a presentation of the changes introduced by Emmy+
an analysis of malicious forks

an analysis of selfish baking

For the ease of reference, denote the dishonest baker by D. To illustrate the corresponding scenarios, consider the following tree with root block B0. The branch B1, B2, B3 represents the chain being constructed by an honest baker, while B’1, B’2, B’3 the one D tries to construct. Let ti (resp. t’i) be the time of block Bi (resp. B’i). The label on top of a box represents the priority at which the block is created.

The three scenarios are as follows: (1) D bakes his block B’1 before B1, that is, t’1 ≤ t1. (2) D bakes his block B’2 before B2, that is, t’2 ≤ t2 (but t’1 > t1). (3) D bakes his block B’3 before B3, that is, t’3 ≤ t3 (but t’1 > t1 and t’2 > t2).

In scenarios (2) and (3) it is assumed that D also has the slots at priorities 1 to p2 for the level corresponding to B2, and similarly, it also has the priorities 1 to p3 for the level corresponding to B3. Therefore the lowest priority at which an honest baker can bake is p2+1 and respectively p3+1.

a brief presentation of the rationale for choosing the values of Emmy+-specific constants

A short developer’s guide to Tezos by CryptoMike.

There is now enough stuff that the platform can be not only useful, but also easy to use for anyone.

Conseil (docs) — Tezos blockchain indexer and REST API.
ConseilJS (docs) — A Typescript library for Conseil and Tezos node interactions. There are also HTML and React/Electron samples.
TezosKit — Native iOS library by Keefer Taylor to interact with the Tezos platform, including Conseil support.
ConseilPy — A Python library with functionality to interact with Conseil and Tezos nodes. This code comes from Baking-Bad.
SmartPy — A smart contract IDE for Tezos from Smart Chain Arena.
Kiln — Created by Obsidian Systems, it is a slick interface for running a Tezos node for baking.

There is also a growing set of smart contract samples that come with complete code and interaction examples in ConseilJS.

To be able to use all of this stuff immediately, get in touch with them on the Riot developer channel.

ConseilJS beta 0.2.7 is out with several smart contract goodies, most notably better integration with SmartPy. the critical thing this version enables is a seamless contract development process! Over the last several weeks Cryptonomic has been working with Smart Chain Arena — developers of SmartPy. SmartPy is more than a Python-style syntax. It’s a fully integrated development environment for smart contracts on Tezos. Not only can you compose your code in a friendly, popular syntax, but you can also test it and deploy it, all from a single interface, and all completely trustlessly. This version of ConseilJS provides the functionality necessary to deploy and invoke contracts.
Michelson updates in 005:

In particular:

smart contracts now support entrypoints
contracts can now create, store and transmit as many big_maps as they want
comparable types are now closed under products (i.e. the pair constructor)
a new instruction, CHAIN_ID, allows contracts to differentiate between the test chain and the main network
a gas cost overhaul has been integrated, and STEPS_TO_QUOTA has been disabled until a more robust semantics is found.

Some new instructions have been added in order to make Michelson a better compilation target for high level languages:

new stack instructions DIG n, DUG n, DIP n { code }, DROP n
support for partial application and closures with the APPLY instruction

Finally, a series of changes implement the new, cleaner, distinction between accounts and smart contracts as described in Cryptium Labs’ blog:

the instruction CREATE_ACCOUNT disappears
the type of CREATE_CONTRACT changes, as a consequence of the amendments described in Cryptium Labs’ blog
during the migration, the manager operations currently implemented at the protocol level will be automatically converted into smart contract entry points.

The changes should NOT break or radically change the semantics of existing contracts. It may ONLY change the interface that they expose. As a consequence, shallow changes to the rest of your stack may be needed.

In particular:

some RPCs will expect different inputs and provide different outputs;
the binary representation of operations will change due to both the account rehaul and entrypoints;
the introduction of multiple entrypoints can give a special meaning to some existing annotations on arguments (such as %default), changing the type of some pre-existing contracts;
some gas costs are updated.

Kiln Release! v0.6.0 is a big one

The major updates in this release are:

The Kiln Node can be started from a snapshot
The Kiln Node runs in Full Mode
Kiln can monitor full nodes
The Obsidian Public Node cache is now enabled by default
Notifications reminding the Kiln Baker to vote
A Notification when an update to Kiln is available

Update: Week Of 15 July 2019

Grantees and Funded Entities

Here are some updates on what their grantees and other funded entities have been up to this week:

Nomadic Labs introduced an all-new open source Tezos blockchain indexer.
Tezos Commons released an explainer video that breaks down why Tezos is the best platform for security tokens.
TzStats pushed out the first development update tackling the Tezos data trail.
tezblock released the results from their user feedback calls and survey.
Cryptonomic shared some insights from the recent meetup in Cameroon, the first Tezos meetup in Africa
Tezos Korea announced a new training program to take place in Busan
A new grantee, CamlCase Tech, announced that they are building a Uniswap inspired decentralized exchange on Tezos called Dexter.

Activities

This past week has been a busy one at the Foundation as well. Below are a few details that they can share:

They announced that security expert and entrepreneur Ryan Lackey has been appointed to the Tezos Foundation Council. For more on Ryan’s background, read the full announcement.
An interview with CryptoLiveLeak. They had a great conversation that touched on a ton of different topics.
Foundation council member, Hubertus Thonhauser, recorded a podcast with Jonas Lamis at Tezonomics.
They are hard at work on the first biannual report. This is a large undertaking but they think the final product will help everyone involved with Tezos get a sense of where they are and where they are going.
They extended the deadline for fundraiser contributors to claim a Tezos-engraved Ledger Nano S, and are preparing to release the first wave of redemption codes.

Babylon: Proposal Injected. Its main changes to Tezos are:

a new variant of the consensus algorithm, Emmy+, that is both more robust and simpler to analyze,
many new Michelson features which have been eagerly awaited by Tezos smart contract developers and designers of higher-level languages,
an account rehaul that establishes a clear distinction between accounts (tz1, tz2 and tz3) and smart contracts (KT1),
refinements to the quorum formula and a new 5% proposal quorum.

Social encounters

Tezos Korea held a blockchain training camp in Busan to raise awareness of Tezos across Korea and disseminate blockchain technology by educating students and the general public.
Tezos Israel with the support of Chain Accelerator and Nomadic Labs held a Training blockchain in Tel Aviv to raise awareness of Tezos across Israel and explain blockchain technology by educating students and the general audience.

“Talking Michelson and Formal Verification during the lunch break”

Day 3 Beginning — Michelson Exercise

Few Words to build a complete auction service as an exercise

Live discussion on the new developments on Tezos and explaining “Coq Proof Assistant” with Bruno Bernardo from Nomadic Labs.

Introducing the newest tezos Developers

Why Managing the Stack in Tezos is simplest and Cheaper than ethereum upcode: Watch via link

SimpleStaking has received a grant to build a secure, trustworthy, and open-source Tezos node in Rust! Rust is a popular programming language with a focus on safety. For the third year in a row, Rust maintained its position as the most loved programming language in Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey, which polled over 62,000 developers. The Simple Staking team will collaborate with Nomadic Labs and other Tezos developers for this project, and will also attend conferences and events to increase awareness and adoption of Tezos in the Rust and larger blockchain development communities.
Tezos issued a grant to TulipToolsOU to continue to build and improve the Tplus development environment for Tezos! Check out the post to learn more.

Upcoming events:

Arthur Breitman will be speaking about Tezos and blockchain technologies in general at #BFC2019EU in Dublin, October 7th to 9th.

Finance

Huobi Announces Its Wallet Be ‘Baking’ Tezos With XTZ Support Coming.

Partnerships and team members

Tezos x IDEO — Announcing a multi-protocol online hackathon focused on growing the global blockchain and crypto ecosystem!

Rumors

Nicolas Cantu tweeted “Chain Accelerator preparing the tezos training at Tel Aviv with @ET91149252 at Barclays Accelerator”
A telegram group to discuss with the community about SmartPy and SmartPy.io. This group can be found via t.me/SmartPy_io. Please feel free to come and share your SmartPy questions and experiences!

Social media metrics

Tezos community continues to grow. There is a constant increase in the number of subscribers of Tezos social media channels.

There is also Tezos Riot chat and YouTube channel.

The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Tezos Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.

The Tezos Foundation is committed to supporting organizations that contribute to the growth of the Tezos community and the ecosystem. They are especially interested in supporting regional organizations and university-based groups focused on Tezos and the larger blockchain ecosystem.

Check out some of the community organizations that compose the Tezos ecosystem: