NFTs and Beyond: The 2021 Q2 Tezos Development Update

NFTs took off in a big way in the Tezos space in Q2. Hic et Nunc became one of the top NFT platforms on the Web, Kalamint had a successful launch, Formula One cars started featuring Tezos livery and OneOf did a massive fundraise for music NFTs. Naturally, a lot of our energy at Cryptonomic was devoted to supporting these projects and also really focusing on integrating NFTs into our tool stack.

The growth in NFTs was followed closely by growth in Tezos DeFi. As Tezos users became even more involved with DeFi apps, they clamored for deeper DeFi support in our tools. We responded by integrating multiple DeFi apps into the Galleon wallet.

NFT Image Proxy

NFTs can be fun, inspirational and lucrative. But, as with most things online, they can be used for spam and abuse. An attacker might send NFTs linked to offensive imagery and expect their victims to involuntarily see these images while opening wallets and explorers. In the blockchain space, we aspire to reduce centralization as much as possible so there is a delicate balance to be struck between user well-being and decentralization. With this in mind, we worked on and launched an NFT image proxy.

The nominatively deterministic NFT image proxy acts as an intermediary between user-facing applications and various storage mechanisms like IPFS and the Web. It both caches content for faster loading and also applies automatic moderation APIs to identify offensive content. If a Tezos wallet and explorer asks the NFT image proxy for an NFT image file, the proxy returns a cached copy of the image along with content moderation information. This allows the wallet or explorer to block displays of offensive content and then only display it with the users’ active consent. Thus, no content is truly censored but the option to view it can be left fully to individual users. This will hopefully make Tezos NFTs safe and performant for all.

The code for the image proxy is open source and runnable by all. For those who don’t want to run their own infrastructure, we offer a publicly available instance. We hope to contact all major toolmakers in the Tezos space and get them to start using this software soon.

Galleon Mobile

In further concert with the rise of Tezos NFTs, we started imagining what an NFT-centric user experience would look like for Tezos users. After extensive conversations on Clubhouse and an organized chat with our users we came to the conclusion that we can best serve NFT the teeming numbers of enthusiasts by providing a single interface in which they can look at all their NFTs in a consolidated way. Interestingly, there seemed to be a lot of interest in physically interacting with these virtual objects. As a result, we have decided to refocus Galleon Mobile into an NFT-centric wallet. Our design process resulted in a mobile NFT gallery which people can use to scroll through their owned artwork any time and from anywhere, as long as they have their phones:

Development is actively underway on this updated version of Galleon Mobile and a release is expected soon:

Other Galleon Mobile highlights include:

• Refactored the designs to adapt responsively on both iOS and Android and for all device sizes.
• Redesigned the information architecture to improve app navigation and allow for easy feature integrations in the future.
• Redesigned user flows to improve the UX for sending transactions.
• Work ongoing for an imminent Android release

Galleon

Since we have talked mainly about tokens so far, let’s now talk about DeFi. The established backbone of Tezos DeFi now are FA1.2 and FA2 contracts for representing tokens, along with the Beacon protocol to make DeFi sites compatible with Tezos tooling. With this in mind, we made a lot of efforts to refine Beacon support in the Galleon wallet to make it smoother and more resilient. Correspondingly, we added a dedicated screen for tokens to make them easy to find and interact with. Together, these should make Tezos DeFi a lot smoother for our users, especially those who hold a lot of different tokens.

Other Galleon highlights include:

• Added integrated token trading for QuipuSwap and Dexter
• Added a new landing page and management interface for tokens
• Engaged with Plenty & Crunchy teams to bring tighter integration of their DeFi products to Galleon
• Added some support for Tezos Domains
• Added sovereign currency display for XTZ balances
• Added more general support for FA2 tokens building on the already-popular Hic et Nunc integration.
• Expanded parsing of Beacon dApp transactions.
• Deployed Galleon to the Mac App Store.
• Various feature requests and bug fixes from community reports.

Conseil and ConseilJS

As usual, we tested the Conseil API and the ConseilJS library for Tezos with each passing protocol upgrade on Tezos, making changes where necessary. A lot of work was done in Conseil to add metadata from Tezos smart contracts and maintain a history of big_maps from smart contracts, both of which should help with rapid and effective development of NFT and DeFi apps. These features are code complete now and are being actively tested for an imminent release.

ConseilJS highlights include:

• FA token changes in support of new functionality in Galleon, Galleon Mobile and Arronax.
• Updates related to protocol upgrades.
• Improved operation fee estimation.

The Rest

After the wildly successful launch of Hit et Nunc, we helped the team scale their application by helping them switch over to the Conseil API and by scaling our own back-end infrastructure to meet the incredible demand from their users.

We similarly helped Kalamint scale after their own bumper launch by also working with them to switch over to Conseil and take advantage of our scaled back end. We later helped Kalamint run their own instance of Conseil, thus ensuring the Tezos ecosystem retains as few single points of failure as possible.

Ateza, an existing Tezos baker, recently launched free and public globally-distributed Tezos and Conseil nodes. We helped Ateza set up their nodes and tested their setup to ensure a smooth launch. We look forward to integrating Ateza’s nodes into Galleon and seeing what new capabilities they bring to the Tezos ecosystem.

Last but not least, our infrastructure team worked hard over the quarter to keep operations humming along as smoothly as possible in the face of exploding Tezos usage. With their sleeves rolled up and utilikilts full of WD-40 and duct tape, our infra team were able to minimize disruptions so much that many a Tezos user might not even have realized the extent to which Tezos usage has grown over the quarter.

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.