One of the friction points you will encounter when you start developing more complex dapps for your smart contracts happens when creating multiple new transactions in a row. Each Tezos account holds a counter that increments every time an operation is included in a block on the network. This means that you cannot forge a new transaction if you already have a pending transaction or you will get the now infamous error message Counter 12345 already used for contract tz1...

There are different scenarios when you want to send multiple transactions at the same time: for example, you could hold in your dapp every update request from your users before asking them to confirm them and emit them all at once. Taquito created the Batch API to make the process easier. …

How to be sure your Ligo code compiles to the Michelson code you want

Ligo is a fantastic tool that makes working with Tezos smart contracts a lot easier. However, its ease of use means that the compiler takes care of the heavy lifting for you and may compile your code down to a format you may not want. This becomes particularly important with TZIP standards: these standards establish fixed Michelson structures that could make your code useless if you don’t respect them. Here is a very simple example:

Imagine you have a record in Ligo like this one:

let my_record = {
  owner: "tz1...";
  balance: 100n;
  name: "John Smith"…

I decided to work on a little project during the weekend and try the updated version of the contracts offered by TQ Tezos. These contracts implement the basic features of an FA2 contract according to the TZIP-12 standard. So I made some coffee, opened VSCode and started diving into the code written in CameLigo (the whole thing being made a lot easier now with the new VSCode extension from Ligo that allows syntax highlighting within the editor). While I was reading it, I thought it could be interesting to document the thought process and the different steps involved in extending an FA2 contract or even any contract written with Ligo for that matter. …

It is incredible to see how far the Tezos blockchain has gone in just 6 months: at the beginning of 2020, TezBridge was the only wallet around and the possibilities of dapps on Tezos were very limited. Now, in the fall of 2020, we have Thanos, a better and more elegant wallet to interact with dapps and we have oracles! Oracles are a game-changer as they allow smart contracts to have access to live data. …

Part 1 is available here.

In Part 1, we had an overview of the TZIP-7 proposal, we set up our project in the Jupyter notebooks and we checked the structure of the parameter and the storage for our FA1.2 token.

In Part 2, we explore the code for the %transfer entrypoint. It is an important piece of the contract (and the longest one) as it allows or restricts transfers.

Now let’s dive into the code 👨‍💻

The transfer entrypoint

In general, what I like to do at the very beginning, is unwrapping the structure laid down by the parameter. Because the parameter is made of nested union values, there will be some logic switches to implement the entrypoints of the contract. …

Take your Michelson skills to the next level with a more complex project

In the last tutorial about Michelson programming language (the miniTez token), we created a simple token that was just transferring an amount of tokens from one account to another with minimal verifications.

The need for standardizing token interactions on Tezos has driven the community to create token standards that indicate how the tokens behave and how they can be interacted with. This has been the goal of the TZIP-7 proposal. After reading the miniTez tutorial, it should be very easy for you to understand what the TZIP-7 proposal adds to basic token transfer. …

Everyone on Tezos speaks about tokens! The different proposals, like the TZIP7 and more recently the TZIP12, allow the creation of complex tokens on the Tezos blockchain. Reading the proposals for less tech-savvy readers can be a little overwhelming as they are full of technical terms and references to Michelson. They are also based on common features tokens developed for blockchains present, may it be for Ethereum or Tezos.

Sometimes, the best way to understand how something works is just to build it yourself! This is the goal of this article, we are going to build miniTez, a minimalistic token for the Tezos blockchain. The token does only one thing: it transfers value from one user to another (a little bit like what Bitcoin does). Transferring value is at the core of tokens use and it is a fundamental mechanism to understand. …

The landscape of dapp development on Tezos has evolved a lot these last six months. It went from a painful and long endeavour to a walk in the park. This change has been possible thanks to the introduction of powerful tools that allow developers to focus on providing value and functionalities to their dapps and to forget about the technicalities of plugging their dapp to the blockchain.

Taquito doesn’t need any introduction, it is the de-facto tool to connect your Tezos dapp to the blockchain. But don’t let its monopoly position lure you, it is an amazing tool and will make your job as a developer 100 times faster and easier. With a few lines of code, your dapp will be set up and connected to the blockchain and your smart contract. …