Cryptonomic 2020 Q4 Tezos Development Update
Following eventful first, second and third quarters in 2020, our focus during the fourth quarter last year was on bringing enhanced security to our users and DeFi capabilities to Tezos users in general.
Community
With an uptick in the user-facing Tezos projects, especially in the DeFi space, we naturally found ourselves helping get multiple collaborators’ projects off the ground as we used our expertise to ensure those projects could be launched in a safe, timely and user-friendly manner.
On the heels of the USDtz launch, we assisted Tezos Stable Technologies with getting ETHtz off the ground. ETHtz is now available for trading on Dexter. In order to bring further liquidity to these new stablecoin ventures, we repurposed our summer project for atomic swaps between the Ethereum and Tezos blockchains and are now building Tezex Bridge, an atomic swap exchange for trustlessly exchanging synthetic assets between the Tezos and Ethereum blockchains, for Stable Tech. The back end, including the necessary smart contracts and liquidity bot scripts, are code complete and tested on delphinet. The next step is to build a polished front end for a full launch on mainnet.
Likewise, we assisted StakerDAO with the launch of wXTZ by ensuring Tezos users could use it from Galleon from the day of its launch.
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Elevated Returns has been working on multiple projects to use fungible tokens on Tezos to help people across different locations and domains. We were delighted to lend them our Tezos expertise over three projects, each of which is in different stages of execution. For the Chef’s Club Collective, a community-oriented effort to rescue the restaurant industry, we are helping add token functionality to the mobile apps and also with publishing token holdings on to the Tezos blockchain nightly through a paused FA1.2 contract. For the Aspen Trust Collective and Vaccine for Thais projects, we are building lightweight, intuitive mobile apps for storing and using reward tokens which help with the fight against coronavirus.
There still aren’t any community gatherings and even online events are rare but we were represented on Tezos Commons’ TezTalks Radio podcast’s 2020 year-end wrap up.
Galleon
The Galleon wallet has always had secure storage, access and use of crypto assets as its overriding priority. This past quarter, we made several efforts to further strengthen security, the chief of which was undergoing an audit by Trail of Bits. The audit is now complete and we have already started implementing the recommendations they made to us, some of which have been released in previous weeks. We will complete all fixes in the current quarter and publicly publish the audit report along with Trail of Bits’ assessment of our fixes.
Galleon Mobile now has an innovative feature, a prominently-displayed security level badge, to incentivize users to keep their funds secure. The security levels are represented by different types of marine life, which provides a friendly and motivational tone for new users to learn best practices in securing their crypto funds. Users of new wallets will start off with a “goldfish” level security badge. They can upgrade themselves to more robust badges by taking different security measures until they upgrade themselves to whales! This encourages users to perform actions like backing up their key mnemonics, adding a biometric lock, etc.
Speaking of biometrics, we are now taking advantage of the biometric security features of iPhones and Android phones by adding biometric locks to mobile Galleon wallets. This provides an added layer of security so users who share their phone PINs or passwords with their friends and family don’t end up inadvertently exposing their crypto holdings.
Mnemonic backup isn’t very useful without mnemonic restore so we added a restore feature to Galleon Mobile. Now our users can switch devices without having to fret about moving their balances manually between accounts.
With the advent of Tezex Bridge, Dexter, Quipuswap and other Defi applications, it’s imperative that Tezos users be able to use their wallets with dApps in a secure and convenient manner. After seeing the impressive strides in usability and security made by the Beacon protocol and plugin we felt the time was finally right to add dApp integration into Galleon. After a great effort by our team, we are happy to announce Beacon integration into our desktop wallet (including fee estimation), with mobile support following shortly. We will soon put out YouTube tutorials on using Galleon with all major Tezos dApps.
Some of the other Galleon work done in the past quarter includes:
- Improved onboarding flow for file wallet creation
- BIP-44 derivation path support to account restore
- Private token deployment for undisclosed clients
- Improved token UI
- Bug fixes for error presentation, mnemonic entry, account activation, etc
- Minor Delphinet updates
- Initial Harpoon integration
UI Tools
After releasing Harpoon and Periscope in Q3, we took some time to sit back and focus on their usability. While we made several tweaks and fixes, the most important initiative was running a full-on user test focused on the user experience of these new tools. After talking with multiple Tezos users, we compiled the findings and made the high-level findings public. The overall feedback for both tools was quite positive, with several useful suggestions by our users. A common complaint was that the tools were hard to discover so we will be promoting them more actively and explicitly linking to them in Galleon after implementing changes according to the user test findings.
Likewise, we also received a spate of feedback from bakers after launching and demoing Harpoon. We took all of it into account and changed the way baker grades are now being calculated. We anticipate making further fine-grained changes as we get even more live feedback from our baker friends.
ConseilJS
ConseilJS was once again instrumental for adding new functionality to the Galleon & Galleon Mobile wallets. Besides making several contract parsing and invocation bug fixes, we also started addressing the results of the Trail of Bits audit. In addition, we added initial support for Dexter and created a wrapper for the wXTZ smart contract.
Conseil
Following on forking support we added in Q3, we identified some residual issues while running the Conseil code in production and are in the process of adding fixes as it is absolutely essential we get the fork-processing logic correct so we always have accurate data for our users from the Tezos blockchain.
As we get bug reports and optimization requests from various Conseil users, we have come to realize the importance of extensive logging. We therefore worked on both clarifying and expanding logging of all actions by the Conseil indexer. Hopefully, this will allow us to serve Conseil users better in the coming months.
Finally, we added contract hashes to the Conseil database. This allows us to gather more accurate information about the usage of specific Tezos smart contracts while also helping calculate more accurate fees for our users when they use wallets and other products which use Conseil.
Nautilus
After using Nautilus Core as an internal development tool, we released the product to the public. Nautilus core makes it easy to manage multiple instances of Tezos nodes along with associated tooling like indexers and block explorers for developers who like to test locally against multiple Tezos networks.
At the same time, we continued building out Nautilus Cloud as a full-service Cloud offering for Tezos. We have completed integrations with Stripe for card payments and ForgingBlock for tez payments. The whole codebase has been refactored for modularity using microservices in preparation for the launch of billing functionality. In the coming quarter, we’ll build out the front end for the final incarnation of Nautilus Cloud.
Conclusion
2020 was a difficult year for us all but it was also an opportunity to stay focused and do some good work in the blockchain space. After working hard over these months both on our open source Tezos tools and our enterprise finance consulting work, we are more excited than ever about the places these still-new decentralized technologies can take us. We know 2021 will be a similarly productive year and we hope it is also a social one so we get to see our users, our colleagues and our ecosystem partners soon.
We hope to continue our work and introduce new decentralized applications in the coming years to help realize the potential of Tezos as a powerful and accessible digital commons.
