The Tezos Dev Series: Asbjørn Enge (TezID & YayNay)

Whoami

My name is Asbjørn Enge and I’m a systems architect and developer located in Norway 

I’ve been interested in computers my entire life, and being a bit philosophically inclined, Linux and free software became an interest and a passion early on. This also lead me to bitcoin and the blockchain space.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. But have been working on all sorts of projects from embedded Linux libraries to large airport software deployments. I’ve also managed a PoW farm  These days I do architecture and DevOps for a SaaS company in addition to building dapps; TezID and YayNay 

Tezos

Really getting into the blockchain space in 2016/2017 I saw a lot of flaws with PoW and also the governance aspect of blockchains (ref. the blocksize war and DAO hack). I remember stumbling across the Tezos whitepaper that was addressing my exact concerns at the time, and I’ve been following Tezos ever since 

What I like about Tezos is that they acknowledge that a blockchain is a “shared resource” / “public good” by putting governance front and center. Also having a formal upgrade path is a fantastic and important feature.

Both these features will allow Tezos to embrace new ideas and stay relevant in an ever-changing world . Like compounding interest they can push Tezos to the  and far beyond  leaving other chains in the dust.

When it became time for me to build my own dapps, Tezos was the only logical choice!

TezID

I’m interested in governance. Especially in novel ideas like Quadratic Voting. I wanted to build an on-chain voting mechanism that utilized QV. For this, I needed a new fundamental. I needed a way to verify that a voting address belonged to a single human being and that there were no duplicates. Or as close as I could reasonably get to that goal 

This new fundamental became the Tezos Identity Oracle; TezID 

Turns out TezID provides useful functionality for more than just my initial problem. It is now taking up most of my time  We just launched “Passport Proofs” that gets us really close to 1 address 1 human. It has sparked a lot of interest from other dapps and platforms in the ecosystem. We also just announced our Roadmap which includes a token and much more 

Busy, but very exciting times ahead 

YayNay

YayNay is the voting dapp I originally wanted to build – that required TezID to support QV. It’s currently a little on the back burner as TezID is taking so much of my time. But I want to build it into a full-fledged on-chain voting platform that will support a range of voting procedures. I hope to demonstrate this by doing some of the future TezID governance via YayNay  

Building dapps On Tezos

Building dapps on Tezos is great fun! 

I mostly use SmartPy and their online editor. It has great support for writing tests  You can also deploy via their online suite, but I prefer cli and a few scripts to handle that  I’ve been meaning to get into LIGO and the new JsLIGO dialect. Archetype also looks interesting!

What I would like to see is a simple local interpreter that can run my tests. A tool where I can do tezzi init to get a basic project and a config file. Write a simple contract, a few tests and do tezzi test and perhaps tezzi deploy florence or something.

What I don’t want is a huge suite like truffle. It’s more work to manage the suite than to build the contract 

That we have our own Stack Exchange is great! I always get fast and solid answers there  Use it!

PROTIP; please build a CACHE to drive your UI. It drives me MAD when dapps pull data from busy public nodes and assemble everything on the client  It takes like 30 minutes to build a cache that pulls your contract data, does your calculations and serves it up as a JSON API. And your dapp now responds in milliseconds instead of seconds  Do it now!

Future Work

For now, my focus is on TezID. We hope to get broad adoption and build a strong community around TezID, and we have much exciting work ahead of us with the new $IDZ token and its utilities  I also want to build out YayNay more.

I have a few other Tezos projects in mind. Perhaps I’ll find time in the future 

Thanks!

Links