Cryptonomic 2020 Q3 Tezos Development Update

Following on progress from the first two quarters of the year, Cryptonomic was able to cap off the work done earlier and bring some ambitious new tools and features to production. Most notably, we launched Harpoon and Periscope and finished two long-term initiatives with the Conseil indexer and API.

The Cryptonomic tool stack sees continued adoption in the Tezos ecosystem, with the AWS KMS and the Harbinger oracle being the major third-party projects to incorporate our tools into their work and contribute to our open source codebase.

Harpoon and Periscope

Last quarter, we announced that we are building on our existing stack to launch two new user tools — Harpoon and Periscope. Harpoon was launched recently as a staking dashboard which offers Tezos users an objective and transparent comparison of their delegation options.

Periscope, likewise, was launched as a visualization dashboard for Tezos metrics. Unlike other dashboards, Periscope allows its users to look at data over multiple time horizons.

We are actively fine-tuning both tools, focusing on both the metrics we present as well as the performance of the front ends.

Conseil

Since Tezos as a decentralized system can experience forks in its chain due to a variety of factors, it has always been crucial to make all our tools robust to forks. This is especially true for the Conseil indexer as it serves as an authoritative source of Tezos information for wallets, exchanges and explorers. After long last and significant effort, we were able to successfully add fork handling to Conseil. All Conseil users can now rest easier since a potential source of major disruption has now been addressed.

As we mentioned in our last dev update, since Tezos DeFi and cross-chain projects (e.g. ChainLink and TzBTC) are taking off, we have been adding basic Bitcoin and Ethereum support to Conseil for building Tezos-centric apps that involve these other chains. This effort is now complete with Ethereum support added on top of the Bitcoin support we already had. Over the coming months, we hope to bring some Tezos applications to production which will use data from these other chains.

Tezori / Galleon

After the previous quarter’s launch of the mobile version of Galleon, we are now focusing on usability and security improvements. Our design team spent considerable time figuring out ways to navigate our users towards better security practices. The first of these changes to be implemented is an overhaul of the desktop start and onboarding screen.

We have also continued work on Beacon integration for dApp usage with our wallets. We completed an internal proof of concept with our desktop wallet this past quarter and are now actively implementing the corresponding changes for production rollout.

Additionally, we’ve made improvements to the key display view to make it clearer and more informative. The public key and the address now appear on that screen and the private key is hidden behind a warning that must be actioned before the private key can be viewed.

Finally, we wrote an extensive series of new QA tests to improve stability and security across the board.

ConseilJS

After a flurry of work, we were pleased to have the Chainlink integration into Tezos working just in time for the recent Chainlink hackathon. We look forward to seeing the kinds of oracle-based Tezos applications people will now build using our integration tools.

Sometimes it is not enough to simply look at the current state of the Tezos blockchain. Historical balances, baking status, delegations, etc can be very useful for visualization and analytics. While temporal data has been available through Conseil for a long time, we now added support for this feature in ConseilJS.

As mentioned up top, we were delighted to see two notable uses of ConseilJS by our ecosystem colleagues on the AWS KMS and Harbinger oracle projects.

Nautilus

We continued our work on billing in Nautilus Cloud through the quarter. During this time, we have successfully completed two proof of concept implementations, one each for cryptocurrency and fiat payments. We are now in the process of integrating these implementations with Nautilus Cloud.

At launch, our users will be able to select a service package they desire and then be able to pay for these services either with Tezos or a credit card of their choice. With multiple such packages being available at launch, ranging from a free usage package and onwards, our users will have complete freedom to choose one based on their needs.

Over the past two months, we have revived the Nautilus Core project and now have enough of an internal proof of concept running that some of our developers are using the tool to spin up local self-contained Tezos environments for their development work. The tool allows nodes, indexers, explorers and other tools to be brought up on developers’ computers with little to no friction. With a few convenient clicks in a web UI, developers can start working with a brand new Tezos network. Once we add some more core features and test the tool internally, we will be making a public release for the entire community.

Community

The world is still working remotely but we still managed to engage with external communities to promote the Tezos platform as well as our tools. As mentioned before, we were involved with the recent Chainlink hackathon and provided Tezos tooling as well as mentorship and judging. We also supported hackathons by Blockchains for Schools and TechHacks in order to promote Tezos among younger developers in general and female STEM aspirants in particular.

A recent episode of TezTalks radio went over our involvement in the Tezos space as well as our upcoming plans.

Finally, we provided a panelist on the Draper Goren Holm ‘Blockchains and Booze’ event centered around Tezos.

Looking Forward

After around two years of hustle, we are almost at the end of the 2018 grant period. We hope the hard work we have poured into the Tezos ecosystem has been beneficial to our users and partners. It has certainly been rewarding to see the ecosystem evolve along with our tools. We have reached out to the Tezos Foundation for additional funding to continue our projects and add to them to help take Tezos to greater prominence and use. For now, we will be focused on closing out our outstanding efforts and doing some tidying up around the house while some of us also take much-needed breaks!