Development

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ZenGo released an open-source SDK to support Threshold Signature for tezos. Read more about it here. For this Proof-of-Concept (PoC) project they used the open source implementation of TSS for EdDSA signatures. They have invested a lot of resources in implementing TSS and making it compatible and reusable for different kinds of blockchains and digital signatures algorithms. This compatibility allows to rapidly onboard and integrate TSS support with new blockchains.

They plan to continue to extend this project in the future and to work with Tezos community to provide TSS support for the more advanced use cases enabled by Tezos, such as delegation and staking. They will also continue to bring TSS to other chains and coins.

“Anchorage’s open source library will not only make work easier for teams already developing on the Tezos platform, but also help to broaden the Tezos developer community itself.” — Alison Mangiero, President, TQ Tezos

tezos Ledger App Release! v2.2.0 adds Babylon support and a new bip32-ed25519 derivation scheme.

The Babylon amendment introduces changes to the binary format in common operations including transactions, delegations, originations, and reveals. v2.2.0 is the first release which can parse operations from both the Athens and the Babylon protocol. Prior versions will still be able to sign operations on Babylon, but they will not be able to parse them and show them on the Ledger device’s screen. bip32-ed25519 derivation scheme was made possible by Ledger’s most recent firmware update (v1.5.5), support within the Tezos repository (!1164), and this update to the Tezos applications. it supports non-hardened paths, whereas the old ed25519 scheme is the only one that does not support them.

Sergey Glushkovskiy released web version of solidity to SmartPy translator. Check it out via the link.

Ligo is now apart of Microsoft’s Monaco Editor language support.

Learn all about using Ligo for writing Tezos smart contracts with Matej Šima from Stove Labs. He provides all the necessary information for beginners.

Victor Allombert, Mathias Bourgoin and Julien Tesson from Nomadic Labs just published an introduction to the Tezos blockchain, a detailed summary of the technology behind tezos. Here is the PDF version of their paper.

Awa Sun Yin published an article on Babylon2.0.1. This article contains the description of the found issues and their fixes; presents possible paths; and shares with the broader community some crucial lessons learned by both core development teams.

About a week ago, Nomadic Labs discovered two issues: one that limits the efficiency in the multimap Michelson feature included in Babylon2.0; and another that prevents the code_trace RPC call from producing logs. The fixes to the latter require a change in two of the protocol source files. After careful consideration, they conclude that there are two possible paths for integrating them, both dependent on the results of the upcoming vote during the promotion phase for Babylon2.0:

A) The regular route, wait for the next proposal phase and inject Babylon2.0.1, which will be subject to a new iteration of the governance process.

B) Enable the Tezos shell to deploy Babylon2.0.1 (Babylon2.0 with the hotfixes) with the condition that Babylon2.0 is accepted in the promotion phase.

Considering that the both issues are minor and that evolving the Tezos protocol at a steady piece is of higher priority, they introduce option B) as an alternative to A) as it would prevent delaying the features of Babylon by another 3–4 months.

Lastly, the key takeaways for the core development teams are:

A reminder of the importance of testing and promotion phases, which are designed to grant an exit to the protocol in question, should a critical issue be found throughout the governance process. To prioritise lengthier testing periods over adding new features before injecting a proposal, regardless of unexpected circumstances that grant the core developers with more time.

Jev Björsell invites everyone to try some Taquitos, a new development library for building ideas on top of the Tezos blockchain. Check his article for more precise information.

A short update from TulipTools.

Tplus lets you manage any number of Tezos nodes for use with mainnet, or alphanet, as well as sandbox environments used for local testing and (smart contract) development.

In addition to a tezos-node, each environment can contain “Plugins” that make life for developers easier, like CryptonomicTech’s conseil and arronax, or BakingBad’s netter-call-dev, or other block explorers and tools.

And to make use of those plugins and give developers a ready-to-go development experience, Tplus can provide its users with a preconfigured vscode IDE, with things like Ligo and SmartPy.io preinstalled.

Nomadic Labs announced the first release of data-encoding, making it available in the overall OCaml ecosystem. Data-encoding is a library to encode and decode values to JSON or binary format, and is widely used in their contribution to the Tezos project.

In the Tezos 1 project, they use data-encoding for binary serialisation and deserialisation of data transported via the P2P layer and for JSON serialisation and deserialisation of configuration values stored on disk. The library is available through opam (opam install data-encoding), hosted on Gitlab, and distributed under MIT license. This release was only possible following an effort to refactor theinternal tools and libraries. Most of the credit for this effort goes to Pietro Abate and Pierre Boutillier. Additional thanks to Gabriel Scherer who discovered multiple bugs and contributed the original crowbar tests. Planned future improvements of the library include:

splitting the library into smaller components (to minimise dependencies when using only a part of the library), and providing multiple endianness (currently the library only provides big-endian binary encodings).

Let’s say Alice wants to participate in the Tezos network. She’s interested in baking or maybe she’s a smart contract developer that wants to access data on the blockchain. Regardless of her motive, in order to participate in the Tezos network, she must set her device up as a node in the Tezos network. This set up is known as bootstrapping and it involves syncing with the network (downloading the current state of the blockchain). This process is divided into two parts: the handshaking process, during which peers exchange information about each other in order to create a trusted channel for communication. the bootstrapping process, in which a peer syncs with the current version of the blockchain.

AirGap published the tezblock Weekly Update #8 with a short summary of the next steps for tezblock after releasing the MVP and publishing the source code on GitHub with an MIT license. The road from MVP to V1

After the initial release of tezblock they will focus on bringing the minimum viable product to a stable V1 which contains rounding off the rough edges in terms of stability, performance and Babylon 2.0 compatibility. As well as bringing additional features for baker related data, governance and smart contract support.

To kick off the next step they’ve already worked on mockups for the new features and will reach out to interested parties to validate their assumptions and gather additional feedback.

Baker related data in tezblock V1

The next steps & tasks

Continue the development and working on stability and performance improvements Ensure Babylon 2.0 support Validate additional baker related mockups Development of the baker data feature

Michelson testing framework is an important milestone, which was achieved with the support of Tezos Foundation, TQTezos and Tezos Commons. Ultimate combo PyCharm + Tezos plugin + PyTezos for newcomers and experts!

Tezos as a Service (TaaS) — SignalR(WebSocket) Endpoint. The project is still very much in progress, but you can already try it out either from source https://github.com/agile-ventures/TaaS/ or by simply using a Docker image available here.

Project documentation is available at https://docs.tezoslive.io and sample client is deployed at https://client-staging.tezoslive.io.

SignalR source is available at https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR. Documentation and samples are available for example here.

“Congratulations on the one-year anniversary of Tezos becoming mainnet! We have a lot to look forward to as we stand at the one-year mark of mainnet. The TQuorum Global Summit begins on 29 September and will consist of 3 days of technical workshops, panels, and keynote speeches. There will be a day dedicated to staking and a day dedicated to digital securities. You can get a ticket to one or all of the days here. Additionally, we were pleased to announce the release of a fundraiser password support tool. This tool aims to help fundraiser contributors with lost fundraiser passwords to attempt to recover their passwords and access the corresponding recommended allocations of Tezos tokens (tez). To use the tool, go to https://recovery.tezos.com/.”

Grantee Updates

Foundation Activities

In addition to releasing a fundraiser password recovery tool, the Foundation has been working hard to finalize a number of important grants. Specifically, the Foundation was pleased this week to announce that it has issued grants to Kyoto University and Edukera, based in Japan and France, respectively, to further advance the Tezos smart contract development ecosystem. Furthermore, this week they issued a new request for proposals (RFP) for Tezos ecosystem grants. They invite all parties eager to contribute to the Tezos project to submit grant applications.

On top of the Foundation’s grantmaking actions this week, the team is incredibly excited to join the rest of the community at the TQuorum Global Summit in New York City from 29 September — 1 October.

Changes and improvements

Besides performance improvements and other bug fixing they’ve made some changes and added additional features, also thanks go out to the Conseil team and their latest update.

New navigational structure and responsive menu improvements Originations overview list added Endorsements overview list added Delegations overview list added

Delegations tab now supports all the incoming delegations for a baker on their account page

Endorsements of a baker are now displayed on the baker account page

Votes are now displayed on the baker account page (currently only ballots and not proposal votes)

Upcoming changes

As they are looking to transition from the MVP to V1 a few tasks lie ahead of us.

Ensure Babylon 2.0 support Validate additional baker related mockups Adding additional relevant data Development of the baker data feature

Alias and logo for addresses

Are you a baker and would like to have your baker name as an alias for your address or payout account and display your baker logo? Just reach out to them and let them know. In the near future they are also planning on supporting the baker registry.