Cryptonomic 2021 Q1 Tezos Development Update

2021 has already gotten off to quite a start for Tezos with a number of exciting new dApps such as TzColors and Hic et Nunc going online and a number of new DeFi projects taking hold across the ecosystem. As usual, yet another Tezos governance update (edo) went through like clockwork amidst all this action. This exciting activity has kept Cryptonomic busy as a toolmaker for Tezos developers and regular users alike. We have had to constantly make tweaks to our tools and software to stay synchronized with the changes in the Tezos platform and also serve the increasingly sophisticated needs of Tezos developers.

We are excited to announce that we recently completed an audit of our Galleon desktop wallet and the ConseilJS library by Trail of Bits. The audit touched on the technical implementation of our projects as well as the security of user interactions and developer practices. We are delighted to undergo yet another security audit as this ensures our users will remain as safe as possible when they use our Tezos applications. Once Trail of Bits issues a final report, we will make it public as usual on our GitHub repositories.

Community

Artwork based on non-fungible tokens has really taken off on Tezos as many artists seek greener and cheaper alternatives for distributing their works. The launch of Hic et Nunc was met with considerable excitement by the Tezos community and its high usage created issues with various Tezos APIs for the launch team. We were able to help the Hic et Nunc team scale their product by switching many of their data queries over to Conseil so their homepage loaded much faster and the entire product became responsive to the user demand. We estimate the high demand for NFTs has caused a surge in the number of unique (untracked and anonymous) visitors to our back-end infrastructure to about half a million per month. We are now similarly assisting Kalamint to scale their product as well using our Conseil API.

Since the blockchain community is still months away from having in-person events, we hosted office hours with Tezos Japan and Tezos India. We had pleasant and productive conversations with these local Tezos communities and were delighted to note that several friends of ours were hard at work on exciting new Tezos features. Similarly, we have embraced the growth of crypto communities on Clubhouse and helped moderate the Tezos club. We participate in two conversations every week with other Tezos community members to discuss the latest happenings in Tezos DeFi and answer questions from participants curious about Tezos.

We now hold biweekly calls with representatives from the Tezos Foundation and TQ Tezos to get community feedback on our Tezos efforts. We will be setting up some other forums as well in the future to further increase collaboration with the extended community.

Our collaboration with WealthChain, Tezos StableTech, continues moving forward as we launched TexEx Bridge, a fully decentralized atomic swap exchange for moving digital assets between the Ethereum and Tezos blockchains. Work on proper TezEx is also underway to allow decentralized trading of Tezos-based assets. TezEx will buttress the activity of Tezos automated market makers such as Quipuswap and Dexter by providing additional arbitrage opportunities and liquidity. Finally, we have also begun work on TezFin, a Compound-like lending platform for Tezos assets.

Galleon

As the number of Tezos dApps has grown recently, Beacon integration has become crucial for all wallets. Building on our work from the past quarter, we worked on custom support for Hit et Nunc, QuipuSwap, kUSD, STKR and BLND via Beacon in the Galleon desktop wallet. On the mobile front, we are actively collaborating with the Beacon team on ironing out all issues with React Native support so Galleon Mobile can also support Beacon seamlessly in the near future.

After the groundwork laid down by Spruce Systems for decentralized identity on Tezos, we have begun to think about ways in which we can incorporate identity into Galleon. We are using our extensive prior experience with decentralized identity projects to eventually reimagine Galleon as a bearer of both credentials and finances.

Artwork based on non-fungible tokens has really taken off on Tezos as many artists seek greener and cheaper alternatives for distributing their works. We added a gallery view for Hic et Nunc works in Galleon and hope to fully incorporate Kalamint soon.

Nautilus

After about a year and a half of effort, we are proud to have rolled out billing and metering functionality for Nautilus Cloud. Using these features, power users of the Tezos blockchain will have access to always-on reliable infrastructure for developing and deploying their applications. Our hope is that Nautilus Cloud will eventually turn into the Amazon Web Services of the Tezos blockchain and, using Nautilus Core, developers will release their applications in a decentralized manner, unlike what is typically done for Ethereum and other chains at the moment.

Since we are now offering Nautilus Cloud as a full-fledged Cloud service, we have also moved the back end node infrastructure to a new setup we internally call Infra 3.0. Since the applications we offer essentially constitute always-on financial services, we have taken pains to ensure our application infrastructure is even more secure, automated and robust than before. Infrastructure buffs might be interested to know that we have switched over to bare metal from virtual private servers for improved performance.

Conseil

As the Tezos blockchain grows even longer, we need performance improvements so that a full synchronization of the chain history does not take too long and become a point of centralization. We have therefore put out a beta version of Pencroff, a meta-indexer for Tezos. Pencroff stores raw Tezos RPC data in a highly-performant store so that the Conseil indexer and API can read its data from a low latency Apache Kudu cache and eventually reconstruct full chain histories in minutes. Soon, this will allow us to test bug fixes and schema changes in Conseil cheaply in minutes. We might soon provide dumps of Pencroff data as a public good.

Besides this, we made the usual retinue of bug fixes and database tune-ups for our users, most notably for TezBlock and Hic et Nunc over the January, February and March releases.

ConseilJS

As usual, we made several bug fixes for our users of our ConseilJS library for Tezos and enhancements in support of the Galleon wallet over versions 1.1.10, 1.1.11, 1.1.12, 1.1.13, 1.1.15, 1.1.16, 1.1.17.

Conclusion

We would like to once again thank the Tezos Foundation for funding much of our Tezos development work. Starting with the current quarter, Nautilus Cloud and Arronax are no longer funded by the Foundation but we will continue to support them for now as commercial projects.

As usual, we look forward to questions and feedback from the Tezos community through Twitter, Matrix and email. 2021 is shaping up to be a very productive year for Tezos!