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To increase accessibility and spur more open source innovation in the Tezos ecosystem, the Tezos Foundation announced a new area of focus for the near future: supporting the development of additional open source block explorers and smart contract programming languages.

These tools are critical public infrastructure for those building on and using Tezos and the Tezos Foundation thinks they’re important to provide additional stability and product diversity for the community.

Block Explorers

In the months to come, they will fund the long-term development and maintenance of several open source block explorers, giving developers, wallet providers, and others access to a greater set of options to analyze and gather information about the Tezos blockchain.

They will encourage everyone developing these block explorers to collaborate on common standards to ensure the community has the most useful and accessible tools. This collaboration will include: API standards so bakers and other relying parties can query a block explorer and receive consistently formatted data; open source code and quality packaging to allow third parties to run their own public instances of block explorers; and operations and monitoring systems to ensure block explorers reliably provide accurate information.

The development of additional block explorers is already underway. Tezos.ID, a project from Tezos Southeast Asia, has been in operation since June 2017 and is expanding in functionality. Arronax, a project from Cryptonomic, is an analysis-focused block explorer that uses the Conseil API. They are currently in talks with OCamlPro, the developer of TzScan, to provide maintenance funding past its end-of-Q2 grant expiration. These projects, as well as new ones the Tezos Foundation will funds in the coming months, will establish a robust network of block explorers for the Tezos community to utilize.

Smart Contract Languages

Similarly, supporting the creation of new smart contract languages, which enables more developers to seamlessly build on Tezos, continues to be a primary focus of the Foundation. Their objective is to have wide language coverage, which will allow a larger audience of developers to more easily build on Tezos.

Some of this has already started. In addition to several open source high-level language projects, like SmartPy and fi, that have already received funding from the Foundation, Nomadic Labs will continue to work on Michelson, a domain-specific language for writing smart contracts on Tezos, as well as an additional low-level language, Albert, which will serve as a compilation target for other high-level languages. The development team behind LIGO, a simple language designed for relatively large smart contracts, recently announced that the LIGO compiler is equipped to integrate additional syntaxes for LIGO. Currently supported syntaxes are Pascaligo (Pascal-like syntax) and Cameligo (OCaml-like syntax).

Criteria for projects focused on building block explorers and languages to receive funding from the Foundation will be announced in the coming weeks. A full list of those selected as grant recipients for these projects will be announced. Stay tuned for more information.

The Tezos Foundation announced that it has issued a grant to Tezzigator LLC to implement Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud HSM support for Tezos bakers.

Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are physical devices that manage cryptographic keys for greater security. They may be used by Tezos bakers for validation, however, cloud HSM support for Tezos bakers was previously only available via Amazon Web Services. With this grant, the Tezzigator team will make cloud HSMs more accessible to Tezos bakers by enabling support on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The repo for Microsoft Azure support is open-source and available for public use here. The repo for Google Cloud support is open-source and available for public use here.

The Tezos Foundation’s core mission is to support the long-term success of the Tezos protocol and ecosystem. By funding projects imagined by scientists, researchers, developers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, the Foundation encourages decentralized development and robust participation.

Go Tezos is a GoLang driven library for your Tezos node. Go Tezos is split into multiple services underneath to help organize it’s functionality and also makes the library easier to maintain.

In this article, the Nomadic Labs team introduces two new features for the Tezos node: snapshots and history modes.

A snapshot is a file that contains everything necessary to restore the state of a node at a given block. A node restored via a snapshot can synchronise and help other nodes synchronise in the existing network. The only difference is that you cannot query the chain context (balances, baking rights, etc.) before the restoration point, but you can still get the full chain history.

In conjunction, the team also introduces history modes, which represent different policies for determining which past data a node should maintain. They propose three modes: archive (the current mode which keeps everything), full (the new default) and rolling . For now, snapshots can fire up a node in either full or rolling mode.