Summary:
This is the fourth blog post of our ‘’Meanwhile at Nomadic Labs’’ series. We will discuss what we have been working on the past month, in particular about events that we organized or participated in.
Babylon successfully activated around one month ago. A more detailed list of changes can be found in our recent Babylon Blogpost. With all of these new features, Babylon was a way larger protocol change than Athens which was mostly about changing two constants. Babylon significantly touched all parts of the protocol: voting procedure, account system, consensus, and smart contracts. Our most recent proposal, Carthage, was announced in our blog last week. While we were excited for the new protocol proposal, we didn’t expect it to get injected only a few hours after the publication of our blog post.
Apart for our work on the protocol, we have also been busy on other fronts:
Nomadic Labs released its first teaser ”Discover Nomadic Labs in 2 minutes” to introduce ourselves to the French and international community. You can view it here.
We are equally proud to have hosted our first ever Pitch Day. Six blockchain startups from different industries had the opportunity to pitch in front of five experts. You can view the participants in this tweet. Equisafe, a company that specializes in tokenizing real-estate assets on the blockchain, won the competition. They also used the opportunity to announce their first smart contract on the Tezos blockchain (one of the four that will compose the core components of the NYX Standard, which is planned for 2020)
We were the main sponsor of Chainhack 4, a mini hackathon in Lisbon between the 8th and 10th of November. Together with Tezos Commons, we are also sponsoring the upcoming Tezos Barcelona meetup.
Raphaël Cauderlier, Julien Tesson and Colin González from Nomadic Labs presented at the ‘’Tezos Smart Contracts: Programming Languages and Formal Verification’’ workshop hosted by IRIF, the fundamental computer science laboratory of “Université de Paris” (formerly known as “Université Paris-Diderot”). This informal workshop, sponsored by Nomadic Labs and organized by Michel Mauny from the Tezos Foundation, introduced some of the available programming languages, some more experimental languages, and some of the formal verification techniques that are being developed in the Tezos ecosystem. Raphaël gave an introduction to Michelson and a presentation of Mi-Cho-Coq, whereas Julien talked about Albert, an Intermediate Language for Tezos Smart Contracts. Colin presented his PhD thesis project: a spreadsheet-derived language for smart-contract programming. The entire workshop was live streamed in two parts thanks to Marc-Antoine Tréhin: #1 #2.
We also attended Blockchain Corp Paris 2019, with a dedicated Tezos booth. (A large Exhibit with +1500 participants focused on Enterprise and Adoption). Hadrien Zerah, Sajida Zouarhi and Sebastian Larquié were present during this two-day conference to talk about the entire Tezos ecosystem, the challenges ahead, and what differentiates Tezos from many of the other projects out there. We also held a presentation in the workshop area and answered R&D/adoption-related questions.
Arvid Jakobsson and Zaynah Dargaye are working on formally verifying the Spending Limit Contract, using Mi-Cho-Coq. This contract limits the amount of spending that an account can perform in a configurable time window. This is similar to how a typical credit card imposes daily spending limits for security reasons. This contract forms an integral part of the Cortez wallet, making its formal verification a priority.
Last but not least, we are currently looking for interns! Apply before December 15th. More details in this tweet.