2021 Q3 Tezos Development Update

Cryptonomic recently celebrated its fourth birthday. We believe we made it this far through attention to detail and commitment to constant improvement. In this spirit, we spent the third quarter of the year refining our Tezos stack in numerous ways against a backdrop of ever-growing usage.

Image proxy

After kicking off work on a content proxy for NFTs last quarter, we finally released the project to production and integrated it into Galleon Mobile for displaying moderated NFT content within the wallet. Our scalable infrastructure deployment contains load balanced instances using our own set of private IPFS nodes.

We have been adding video moderation support for MOV and MP4 encoded files and we should be done within a few weeks. Once this functionality is available and the project is proven out in production, we plan to start helping interested Tezos projects with integrating it into their products for a smoother and safer user experience.

Galleon

We worked hard on making the Galleon Desktop app more usable and featureful. After adding initial support for Hic et Nunc (HEN) NFTs in the Q2 we’ve expanded it to include more item details and to include token transfers. As mentioned above, we added support for our image proxy which not only caches image content for significantly faster load times, but also has automated moderation features giving our users the option of not viewing content that may have been sent to them without solicitation. NFT projects are blossoming on Tezos beyond just HEN, which remains the engagement and creation leader. We are certain to add more NFT features in the coming months.

DeFi is another area of rapid development on Tezos. Galleon was quick to support Dexter and QuipuSwap. In the midsummer, we enabled swaps on those exchanges directly in Galleon. More recently we updated that functionality to include swaps and LP on the “Liquidity Baking” system. We’ve also added more than a dozen new tokens to Galleon, including governance and asset tokens from popular ecosystem projects. In the case of Plenty, for example, we have integrated rewards harvesting with one click and the same with Kolibri DAO tokens.

Beyond token-based projects we integrated Tezos Domains, improved Beacon features and fixed various issues based on user feedback. This section covers Galleon releases 1.1.23b, 1.1.24b, 1.1.25b and 1.1.26b.

Galleon Mobile

After designing an NFT-centric mobile wallet experience in Q2, we focused on building it out in Q3. As a result, iOS users can now scroll through their NFTs with ease and convenience:

Conseil

In the interest of brevity, here is a summary of the import of the Conseil work we did:

• TZIP-16 metadata support: Conseil will be able to store metadata for most FA2 contracts, especially NFTs.
• Ordering of operations within an operation group: Users can now track the order of complex smart contract interactions.
• Big_maps_contents_history table: Maintaining big_map histories allows time travel through token balances and holdings.
• Granada changes: Some Granada protocol changes were missed in Q2 but are now added.
• Added ‘countDistinct’ in aggregation: An additional way to aggregate data for the Arronax explorer and other tools.
• Updated registered tokens functionality: Allows us to easily update the list of tokens on Tezos without a full Conseil release.
• Other minor bug fixes: Little fixes make a big difference!

These changes have not been released to production yet but prerelease testing is going due to the massive scope of the new features and a new released version is expected out soon.

ConseilJS

Besides all the upgrades needed to support Galleon, ConseilJS was also upgraded to handle changes related to the upcoming Hangzhou protocol upgrade.

The Rest

With the aim of once again understanding the needs of the broad Tezos community, especially our own users, we kicked off a fresh round of user testing. The final tests are still in progress and we will as usual share the results with the community.

The TezAsia hackathon, organized by the Tezos India Foundation, was a resounding success. Our contributions included providing two mentors and hosting several Tezos development workshops to help onboard participants to the Tezos ecosystem.

Our infrastructure team continued to struggle to keep up with the exploding Tezos usage as our back end infrastructure had to be scaled multiple times to face the onslaught!

Cryptonomic would like to thank the Tezos Foundation as always for grant funding which allows this free and open source work to continue for the benefit of the Tezos community.