Updates from ECAD Labs

This tutorial is the first part of a 3 part series of tutorials about writing Sapling contracts with CameLigo. The first tutorial (this one) is about a simple example that only handles XTZ, the second one will be about writing a Sapling contract that handles FA1.2 tokens, and the third will be about writing a contract that handles FA2 tokens.

Sapling has been one of the greatest features brought to the Tezos blockchain in its recent upgrades. It provides an effective way to exchange tez and other fungible tokens anonymously with an API simple enough to be understood and used quickly by every developer.

If you have ever used a dapp on Tezos, you are probably familiar with the most common way of signing a transaction: through your dedicated wallet, whether it be Temple, Kukai, Naan, Umami or another wallet available on Tezos.

It generally works like that: you click a button in the interface of the dapp to interact with a smart contract, the wallet opens, you click “Confirm” to sign the transaction and it is sent to the blockchain to be included in a block.

Sapling is a feature of the Tezos blockchain introduced by the Edo upgrade that allows the anonymous transfer of tokens in a decentralized environment. The introduction of this feature required the addition of several Michelson instructions in order to allow anonymous transactions at the contract level.

Although the use of Sapling is still limited in the Tezos ecosystem, it is a powerful and useful feature. The slow adoption of Sapling is likely due to the lack of support from major Tezos libraries. This is about to change now that Taquito has added new easy-to-use APIs to work with Sapling.

Mutation testing aims to improve your test coverage by checking that unit tests will fail when code is modified. Code changes that do not break existing tests are called “surviving mutants.” Testers hope to identify and eliminate problematic mutants by adding additional tests.

In Taquito, I decided to try mutation testing on the Taquito package called ‘taquito-remote-signer.’ It is a relatively small package that is easy to interact with through unit tests. Taquito uses Jest to execute unit tests. I added Stryker to perform mutation testing.

At ECAD Labs we are admittedly pretty low-key about much of our work. As a developer tooling provider, we want the focus to remain squarely on the fantastic products and services that our users create.

However, as our products play more important roles than ever in the Tezos ecosystem and our development, testing and infrastructure processes mature, we believe that sharing our progress, experience and lessons learned can provide useful insight into the tooling and services you rely on and help our community as a whole.