Cryptonomic 2020 Q2 Tezos Development Update

After a productive first quarter earlier this year in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, Cryptonomic kept up its frenetic pace of development on its open source Tezos projects.

The development and deployment stack we have built now allows us to quickly build and iterate on new projects. As a result, we are adding Galleon Mobile, Galleon Desktop 1.x, Periscope and Harpoon to the Tezos ecosystem. This stack has seen increased usage this year through organic adoption and multiple hackathon projects and has therefore become even more robust and featureful.

As the broader ecosystem expands to multi-chain applications such as stablecoins and oracle systems, we have been building in additional support for cross-chain app development. Soon, we expect to greatly simplify building Tezos-centric apps which can refer to data and contracts on other major blockchain platforms.

Tezori/Galleon Mobile

After announcing in April that we were planning to release a mobile wallet for Tezos, we spent five weeks recently on building it out. Galleon Mobile was announced last week and has received positive feedback so far from the community. We are iterating rapidly on the product and releasing new features every few days and have already integrated with Baking Bad and TezBlock. More integrations should be coming along shortly.

Tezori/Galleon Desktop

Our gut rewrite of the desktop Tezori / Galleon code was completed successfully and the community helped us test some preview releases. A spate of new releases, versioned 1.x, will be coming out soon. The new code base is smaller and better organized, making it easier to contribute to as an open-source project. In light of some recent attacks on cryptocurrency wallets, we reduced & updated dependencies to make the attack surface smaller. The new application structure is easier to extend with custom UIs for special contracts, e.g. the StakerDAO integration.

Again, in the interest of protecting our users, we asked Apriorit to conduct a security audit of the new wallet code and posted the results publicly. The Tezos Foundation has also offered to help us run an additional audit and we are currently engaging with them.

Some new features made available in the new codebase including signing and verifying messages, improved messaging for withdrawals and improving the user experience for account delegation and wallet creation. The upcoming release of Galleon will offer support for decentralized, passwordless authentication, with sample implementation available based on ConseilJS.

There has been a noticeable uptick in Galleon use and our support volumes have gone up considerably. Our team has worked hard to keep up with the load and ensure all users are able to get through their issues. The obsolescence of TezBox will continue to put additional pressure on us even after we published some migration tutorials and created custom tools for our users.

The discontinuation of support for Tezbox instigated users to express their overall dissatisfaction with the state of Tezos wallets. In response, we sent out a feedback survey to determine and address common pain points and user needs. Our survey received twenty-six responses and we reached out to those willing to discuss their experience further. From this feedback, we identified user values, motivations, feature requests, and current points of friction.

We will use this feedback along with data from support tickets to create a product roadmap for Galleon. Our design process has evolved to be more user-centered through iterative cycles of research, testing and design so that our user’s needs are addressed at the earliest stage. We are also addressing some of the more commonly raised issues in the support requests with improved messaging and different UX paradigms.

Conseil

With DeFi taking off and cross-chain projects (e.g. ChainLink and TzBTC) becoming more common, we are adding basic support for Bitcoin and Ethereum across our stack so that developers have a uniform end-to-end experience while building Tezos-centric apps that involve these other chains. We took our first step in this direction by adding Bitcoin support to Conseil such that Bitcoin data is also indexed and available to query. We might consider other chains in the future as they become relevant to the Tezos ecosystem.

We have made several incremental changes in our recent Conseil releases for our users, the chief among them is improving our governance and balance updates data model. Other changes included database optimizations to better serve users like tezBlock and fixing bugs reported by the same users. We also improved documentation across the board and made it easier to deploy Conseil using Docker. With each release, Conseil images are now published to DockerHub.

Conseil now also supports a GraphQL interface, giving app developers another standard avenue to query for Tezos blockchain data. This feature will also eventually be rolled through Nautilus Cloud as a standard developer feature.

ConseilJS

As part of our Tezori / Galleon security review, Apriorit also audited ConseilJS. The results have been made publicly available. We also reduced the number of dependencies for this project and refactored the code into three libraries — ConseilJS, ConseilJS-softsigner and ConseilJS-ledgersigner, so it is now portable across multiple environments like React Native, Google Firebase and AWS Lambda.

Among the notable additions to the library, we updated support for the FA2-series smart contracts, including implementations from TQ and SmartPy. At a lower level we’ve improved contract parsing, added more convenience functions — one can now estimate transaction gas cost, preview pending operations, process complex big_map data and query more data from the Tezos node via the library. We’re also thrilled that Tezsure has picked ConseilJS to build the Tezster Tezos sandbox suite.

Nautilus Cloud

Our efforts to make Nautilus Cloud a fully featured Cloud platform continued in the past quarter. Metering for Nautilus Cloud is now ready and about to be integrated into the UI. Work has already started on billing, which in combination with metering, will allow customization and specialized delivery for Tezos-focused enterprises and development teams.

The Nautilus Cloud UI was also significantly overhauled following on work from Q1. The site now features a modernized look and feel to make the site easier to use and helpful for new users. Several bits of documentation have been added for new entrants into the Tezos ecosystem based on feedback from multiple hackathons and solo developers.

Arronax

We have been working on supplementing the data exploration feature of Arronax with some new interfaces to bring new functionality to Tezos users. Periscope is a tool for visualizing Tezos network statistics, with charts showing views of the endorsement rate, priority zero blocks, transaction volume, etc.

Harpoon is a staking dashboard tool for users to analyze baker performance. The tool shows statistics related to given bakers along with a summary letter grade as well as validating payouts to individual users.

Both Pericope and Harpoon are being actively implemented and releases are expected in the coming weeks. We have designed our usability tests and are recruiting participants to test our first iteration of these tools.

We have also created a new landing page for Arronax. Many users found it confusing to be taken directly to a data navigator. Instead, we will now be providing context for the tool and providing example datasets serving as starting points for Arronax usage. Between this new landing page, Periscope, Harpoon and the Mininax block explorer, there will soon be multiple entry points into the Arronax data navigator. With some planned UX improvements in the coming months, our hope is to deliver a truly usable and powerful analytics tool to Tezos analysts and users.

Baking

As we continue to bake on the main Tezos testnet, we have come to realize that there is a need for better baker utilities. With that in mind, we are working on an as of yet unnamed baking rewards distributor which bakers can use to pay out their delegators. The code is written as simply as possible in Python to encourage community participation to improve the tool and refine the metrics it uses. The tool is expected to be made public by mid-August.

Nautilus Core

The Nautilus Core project has been on ice for quite some time due to a lack of capacity. However, we are now resuming work on this project with an initial objective of solving some practical problems for Tezos developers. We are currently working on making it easy to quickly spawn and synchronize Tezos nodes locally along with instances of our tool stack, e.g. Conseil and Arronax. We are also attempting to make it easy to construct custom local Tezos networks using an intuitive UI, followed by the ability to deploy these bespoke networks to multiple Cloud providers.

Community

Due to the current covid19 crisis we have chosen to drop most in person and online event engagements and instead focus on development work. However, this has not stopped us from sponsoring, mentoring and judging the recent TezIndia hackathon. As a continuation of sorts of this effort, we are also participating in Tezos India’s Tezos Summer of Code. We were also active during the recent Tezos CoinList hackathon, where we assisted multiple teams who used our toolstack.

Looking Forward

We’ll be following up soon with another post describing our Tezos agenda for the rest of the year. Suffice to say, we will be iterating rapidly with both the desktop and mobile wallets to make Tezos a more accessible platform. We have long felt decentralized identity is a necessary part of Tezos growth and we’ll be bringing our expertise into the Tezos realm. As always, don’t hesitate to contact us on Riot / Element as well as Twitter and email.