Tezos: Delphi — A New Protocol Proposal, Significant Growth Of The Smart Contract Activity, Kiln For MacOS, Michelson Labs, Q&A With Tezos Ukraine Co-Founder Mihai Tsybuliak
Tags: Tezos, Staking, Cryptocurrency, Proof Of Stake, Blockchain

Welcome to our traditional biweekly report on Tezos! Get ready to catch up with all the news and events that were up in the Tezos ecosystem over the past two weeks! Today, we have a lot to share, so let’s have a quick overview of the recent updates from the Tezos Foundation, teams, grantees, and operational entities.

To begin with, Tezos smart contract activity has shown an extremely vivid growth recently. Only 256 smart contracts were deployed on the mainnet from June 2018 to July 2020, but in August 2020 alone, 357 smart contracts were deployed! Contract Calls on the Tezos mainnet also reached new highs with 20,699 calls made in August alone, which is more than all other months combined. The total calls on the mainnet now stand at 36,530, with 4,741 made so far this month.

Another crucial update — Tezos teams injected Delphi, the latest proposed upgrade, following Athens, Babylon, and Carthage. Delphi is currently in the Exploration Vote period. It is intended to improve the performance of the Michelson interpreter and gas model and is meant to serve as an interim improvement while another proposal will follow later in the year. Later proposal is expected to include support for features on the Dalphanet test network, including Sapling, baking accounts, and more. According to the announcement, the Delphi proposal intends to “enable novel applications on Tezos that target areas like DeFi, collectibles, and gaming” by improving gas constraints so individuals can more easily develop more complex smart contracts. The proposal also aims to reduce storage costs and improve the safety of Michelson, in addition to providing several other minor bug fixes. By the way, Baking Bad announced that their TzKT Tezos Explorer now supports Delphinet.

Apart from the mentioned above, Tezos is one of the first Layer-1 chains that Biconomy will support enabling meta transactions. It will cut deployment time for developers building new apps and ease the user experience for newcomers interacting on a Tezos based application.

Many Tezos educational materials were published, including a tutorial showing how to implement an oracle call in a contract written in Ligo and how to receive the data back from the oracle. What’s more, Baking Bad, in collaboration with Claude Barde, released the first part of their Tezos Labs project, an interactive learning course for Michelson, the native Tezos contract language. camlCase released version 1 of a series of tutorials to help Tezos developers learn how to use the Tezos RPC to integrate Tezos into their applications.

Tezos Commons published their community update for September, released TezTalks Radio episode 8 featuring Vishakh Null of Cryptonomic and episode 9 with a discussion on STO Developments, Kiln for macOS, DID on Tezos, and the Delphi proposal.

ECAD Labs released a summer 2020 update to share what their team has been working on. SimpleStaking team added a Tezos dissector to their Wireshark network traffic analysis tool. Tezsure released the latest version of Tezster-GUI with new features and minor bug fixes.

Furthermore, Tarides published a blog post on the latest design decisions and performance improvements made to irmin-pack, the Irmin storage backend used by tezos. For more tezos teams’ updates, check the report below!

All in all, the community tends to grow in social networks and multiple Tezos chats! Stay tuned, and see you in two weeks!