Blockchains @ OCamlPro: an Overview

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OCamlPro started working on blockchains in 2014, when Arthur Breitman came to us with an initial idea to develop the Tezos ledger. The idea was very challenging with a lot of innovations. So, we collaborated with him to write a specification, and to turn the specification into OCaml code. Since then, we continually improved our skills in this domain, trained more engineers, introduced the technology to students and to professionals, advised a dozen projects, developed tools and libraries, made some improvements and extensions to the official Tezos node, and conducted several private deployments of the Tezos ledger.

For an overview of OCamlPro’s blockchain activities see here

TzScan: A complete Block Explorer for Tezos

TzScan is considered today to be the best block explorer for Tezos. It’s made of three main components:

• an indexer that queries the Tezos node and fills a relational database,
• an API server that queries the database to retrieve various informations,
• a web based user interface (a Javascript application)

We deployed the indexer and API to freely provide the community with an access to all the content of the Tezos blockchain, already used by many websites, wallets and apps. In addition, we directly use this API within our TzScan.io instance. Our deployment spans on multiple Tezos nodes, multiple API servers and a distributed database to scale and reply to millions of queries per day. We also regularly release open source versions under the GPL license, that can be easily deployed on private Tezos networks. TzScan’s development has been initiated in September 2017. It represents today an enormous investment, that the Tezos Foundation helped partially fund in July 2018.

Contact us for support, advanced features, advertisement, or if you need a private deployment of the TzScan infrastructure.

Liquidity: a Smart Contract Language for Tezos

Liquidity is the first high-level language for Tezos over Michelson. Its development began in April 2017, a few months before the Tezos fundraising in July 2017. It is today the most advanced language for Tezos: it offers OCaml-like and ReasonML-like syntaxes for writing smart contracts, compilation and de-compilation to/from Michelson, multiple-entry points, static type-checking à la ML, etc. Its online editor allows to develop smart contracts and to deploy them directly into the alphanet or mainnet. Liquidity has been used before the mainnet launch to de-compile the Foundation’s vesting smart contracts in order to review them. This smart contract language represents more than two years of work, and is fully funded by OCamlPro. It has been developed with formal verification in mind, formal verification being one of the selling points of Tezos. We have elaborated a detailed roadmap mixing model-checking and deductive program verification to investigate this feature. We are now searching for funding opportunities to keep developing and maintaining Liquidity.

See our online editor to get started ! Contact us if you need support, training, writing or in-depth analysis of your smart contracts.

Techelson: a testing framework for Michelson and Liquidity

Techelson is our newborn in the set of tools for the Tezos blockchain. It is a test execution engine for the functional properties of Michelson and Liquidity contracts. Techelson is still in its early development stage. The user documentation is available here. An example on how to use it with Liquidity is detailed in this post.

Contact us to customize the engine to suit your own needs!

IronTez: an optimized Tezos node by OCamlPro

IronTez is a tailored node for private (and public) deployments of Tezos. Among its additional features, the node adds some useful RPCs, improves storage, enables garbage collection and context pruning, allows an easy configuration of the private network, provides additional Michelson instructions (GET_STORAGE, CATCH…). One of its nice features is the ability to enable adaptive baking in private / proof-of-authority setting (eg. baking every 5 seconds in presence of transactions and every 10 minutes otherwise, etc.).

A simplified version of IronTez has already been made public to allow testing its improved storage system, Ironmin, showing a 10x reduction in storage. Some TzScan.io nodes are also using versions of IronTez. We’ve also successfully deployed it along with TzScan for a big foreign company to experiment with private blockchains. We are searching for projects and funding opportunities to keep developing and maintaining this optimized version of the Tezos node.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to deploy a blockchain with IronTez, or for more information !

Comments

Kristen (3 May 2019 at 0 h 30 min):

I really wanted to keep using IronTez but I ran into bugs that have not yet been fixed, the code is out of date with upstream, and there is no real avenue for support/assistance other than email.

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About OCamlPro:

OCamlPro is a R&D lab founded in 2011, with the mission to help industrial users benefit from experts with a state-of-the-art knowledge of programming languages theory and practice.

• We provide audit, support, custom developer tools and training for both the most modern languages, such as Rust, Wasm and OCaml, and for legacy languages, such as COBOL or even home-made domain-specific languages;
• We design, create and implement software with great added-value for our clients. High complexity is not a problem for our PhD-level experts. For example, we helped the French Income Tax Administration re-adapt and improve their internally kept M language, we designed a DSL to model and express revenue streams in the Cinema Industry, codename Niagara, and we also developed the prototype of the Tezos proof-of-stake blockchain from 2014 to 2018.
• We have a long history of creating open-source projects, such as the Opam package manager, the LearnOCaml web platform, and contributing to other ones, such as the Flambda optimizing compiler, or the GnuCOBOL compiler.
• We are also experts of Formal Methods, developing tools such as our SMT Solver Alt-Ergo (check our Alt-Ergo Users' Club) and using them to prove safety or security properties of programs.

Please reach out, we'll be delighted to discuss your challenges: contact@ocamlpro.com or book a quick discussion.