Zeppelin Solutions Introduces ZeppelinOS: An Operating System for Smart Contract Applications

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Zepplin Solutions has just announced they are working on zeppelinOS – an open-source, distributed platform of tools and services on top of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to develop and manage smart contract applications securely.

What does an EVM operating system look like? The Zepplein team thought about three main components, but other functions may arise in the future, as the industry evolves:

  • zeppelinOS Kernel: an upgradeable and community-governed core of functionality provided by an on-chain smart contract library that developers can call for standard and common functions in their applications. The initial version of this is the current OpenZeppelin framework, migrated to library form. Shared code for smart contract applications to use, with curated opt-in security updates based on the proxy library pattern.
  • zeppelinOS Scheduler: Every transaction on the Ethereum network is initiated and paid by a user. This places a limitation on the kinds of things a smart contract can do and sometimes creates unfair situations. For example, when executing a transaction via a standard multisig contract, the last owner to confirm it will trigger the actual call and pay for its gas costs. Or, if a crowdsale has some finalization logic when the cap is reached, the last token buyer will pay the gas cost of executing that. The zeppelinOS Scheduler will enable async execution on the EVM where a contract can request asynchronous execution of a function and anyone can pay the gas costs and be rewarded for it.
  • zeppelinOS Marketplace: To catalyze exponential growth among decentralized applications, smart contracts must be able to interact with each other in a standard way. Imagine if Augur could talk to 0x to enable prediction market forecasting in any currency, all done using an Aragon company. This kind of interoperability would accelerate progress across the space, helping developers take the ecosystem mainstream, faster. Our proposed solution is to build a marketplace of inter-contract services natively inside the OS.
  • zeppelinOS off-chain tools: As an addition to the on-chain services offered by zeppelinOS, the platform will provide a set of off-chain tools aimed at simplifying the development, debugging, testing, deployment, and monitoring of decentralized applications.

At Zeppelin Solutions, all of our efforts are focused on solving the technical challenges of smart contract application development. We’ve worked with dozens of projects on security auditssmart contract upgradability, contributed to improve and test development tools, and enabled interoperability through our OpenZeppelin standards and security patterns. We are developers ourselves. We believe we know how to make the smart contract development process better, easier and more robust.

We invite you to help us make this happen.