Tezos
Tezos Foundation is a technology company headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, and focused on building Tezos ecosystem and open-source software for enterprises and developers.
As an expert in functional programming and blockchain development, Serokell was invited to help.
Bringing into life pioneering ideas is challenging. The case becomes even more complicated when your project is in the field of blockchain and needs experienced developers. More and more tasks appear, more resources are required.
Finally, you have to attract external teams that can work with the same passion and tempo as you, producing works of the same quality. This is exactly how our cooperation with Tezos Foundation began.
What is Tezos?
Tezos is an open-source platform for assets and applications backed by a global community of validators, researchers, and builders.
With its governance mechanism, Tezos holders can participate in the future of the blockchain through voting. It is also designed to have high safety and code correctness through the possibility to formally verify its smart contracts.
In close coordination with Tezos ecosystem development teams, we regularly conduct in-depth audits and investigate the best practices of competitors to implement new features and establish Tezos as a market leading technology.
Development of Tezos ecosystem:
Initially, the Michelson language was used in Tezos smart contract programming. But due to the low-level nature of Michelson, any complex contract is challenging to implement and hard to maintain and audit.
Morley
The first project that we realized for Tezos Foundation was Morley, a set of tools and libraries that make writing smart contracts more transparent and effective.
Working in close cooperation with Tezos Foundation, we suggested our ideas on how to improve the onboarding and adoption of the Tezos blockchain.
To eliminate the inconveniences of work with a low-level language, we suggested developing a new high-level domain-specific programming language on top of Michelson.
Lorentz & Indigo
Lorentz is a Haskell eDSL (embedded domain-specific language) that provides a more convenient way to write Michelson contracts. Using Lorentz, one can implement migrations, work with upgradeable types, and more. The process of contract submission was streamlined, but still demanded a lot of manual work.
Indigo is a higher-level language that we built on top of Lorentz. It eliminates the burden of manual stack management. Lorentz and Indigo now make Tezos a more convenient platform both for developers and users.
Tezos Packaging
As the installation of Tezos infrastructure using Docker or building from the source was rather complicated, Tezos Foundation invited Serokell to improve it.
Agora
The voting system in Tezos lays the foundation for the future development of the platform. By ensuring that all users, spread across a global community, have equal rights, the voting process spans several days, and the outcomes are transparently aggregated. It's crucial for Tezos developers to know which proposals they are voting on, when the voting period concludes, and whether a proposal was approved or rejected. Serokell has introduced Agora, a web application that tracks the voting process and displays the aggregated results to all participants.
Tzip
Consequently, Tezos Foundation wanted us to set the standards for all the updates and proposals related to the Tezos ecosystem development. The team also asked Serokell to design and implement a solution similar to the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard for the Tezos ecosystem.
We investigated and audited the existing solutions, and created a repository called TZIP (Tezos Interoperability Proposal). TZIP formalizes the process of suggesting improvements to Tezos. By analogy to ERC-20, we created a standard for the Tezos tokens and called it FA1.2.
Kiln & Tandoor
Since 2018, Kiln has been a popular method for creating new blocks on Tezos. However, Kiln's interface was somewhat complicated for new users, while the code had some bugs, resulting in user disappointment. Serokell was initially tasked with maintaining Kiln and enhancing its user interface. After a year of maintaining legacy code, we were invited to develop a modern solution for block baking from scratch. This led to the creation of Tandoor. Tandoor simplifies the process by offering a ready-to-use virtual appliance where all essential tools are preinstalled, eliminating the need for users to manually assemble and install various components.
Private Tokens
Since this project is a long-term partnership, Serokell was working on the development of new Tezos private and public tokens. We are the first team to build smart contracts of that scale on Tezos for production use.
Results
The Tezos ecosystem has grown, adding more and more features, standards, and smart contracts in deployment. Serokell has been supporting Tezos Foundation by actively participating in project development, investigating modern algorithms, and providing a helping hand whenever it is needed.