Quanterall

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Technical Project Director, DApp Platform, at Input Output Global (IOG), which is a research and development company that helped build the infrastructure for the Cardano blockchain.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Quanterall, and what were your goals?

We have worked on Cardano smart contracts for a while when we contacted Quanterall - a company with experience in the Haskell programming language. There is a standard for financial smart contracts: the ACTUS protocol https://www.actusfrf.org The standard defines rules and methods for generating separate financial smart contracts. It is written in natural language, supplemented with mathematical formulas that describe various forms of financial flows, and describes some twenty smart contract types. Marlowe is a special-purpose language that runs on the Cardano blockchain, on top of the Plutus general-purpose smart contract language. Marlowe provides a visual programming interface, as well as a standard text-based approach, for the generation of the smart contracts. Every Marlowe contract can thus be seen visually both as source code and graphically, explaining its workflow. The goal of the Marlowe team was to build an implementation of a representative collection of ACTUS contract types using Marlowe, generating these contracts using a Haskell implementation. The specific Quanterall project was to continue this implementation, extending the range of ACTUS types supported, as well as maintaining and developing the existing implementation.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

IOG first met Quanterall at a meeting in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to celebrate the second anniversary of the launch of the Cardano blockchain, organized by Vasil Dabov (after whom Cardano’s latest hard fork is named). This meeting was hosted Quanterall, and this began our collaboration

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The scope of the work was to create an integration of the ACTUS protocol standard on Cardano in Haskell and Marlowe. The first steps taken by the Quanterall to validate the existing implementation by writing appropriate unit tests against official data, present in the official ACTUS repositories for the corresponding contract types. After doing this, and correcting and enhancing the implementation in some ways, the project was continued to expand the library by adding additional contract types. Again, these were backed up by tests, against real data from the ACTUS test suite.

The technologies we used in the project are:

• Haskell - a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation.
• Marlowe – Cardano’s special-purpose language for modeling financial instruments as smart contracts on a blockchain.
• Plutus - Cardano's smart contract programming language, which is built on Haskell.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

The Marlowe team consisted of seven engineers, two of which were from Quanterall. They were software engineers with experience in functional programming, blockchain, and smart contract development.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The Quanterall team delivered high-quality implementations of a range of financial instruments. Their testing practice was very good, and incorporated the tests from the ACTUS standard in a systematic way. The team was also able to maintain and improve the existing code base to the same standard.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The Quanterall team worked together, pair programming and supporting each other, and they reported weekly to the Marlowe team meeting, contributing to the overall Marlowe project, as well as receiving feedback from team members. Their code contributions were submitted as pull requests to the Marlowe GitHub repository, and were reviewed by core Marlowe team members

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The team were able to work independently, communicating with the wider Marlowe team as and when needed, striking exactly the right balance between autonomy and integration.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Working with Quanterall’s team was very effective indeed. There was probably room for improvement in the team’s knowledge of the available Cardano tools for smart contracts, as well as Haskell, the underlying technology; but despite this the team were able to onboard quickly.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Sumup is a leading Point of Sale and other financial services provider that enable millions of small merchants in 34 countries be successful and grow their business.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Quanterall, and what were your goals?

Payment processing for card acceptance is the core service of Sumup. Ensuring stable and reliable payments experience was always a priority for the company. In order to ensure quality of our service while being able to go faster with new features and software, we needed a good test system.

We started partnership with Quanterall with the goal to automate testing of emv transactions eliminating the need to use physical devices.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Historically we developed very good relationships with Quanterall especially as it comes to talent development. The reason is that both companies were using kind of niche technologies and Quanterall founder invested a lot in learning and development.

We had a good support in finding the right talent for our needs. It is worth mentioning that few members of our core payments team started their carriers with Quanterall. So it was a natural decision to go with Quanterall knowing their professional and tech background.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The technology used was erlang. We needed to cover several acquirers integrations as well to simulate the commands coming from physical devices.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We formed a mixed team of 6 developers - 4 from Quanterall and 2 from Sumup.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

A testing back-end system was developed by using Erlang. Its main tasks were strongly tied with cryptography and financial transaction specifications.

Expertise used were in financial transaction message protocol ISO-8583 and Acquirer ISO 8583 Message Format protocol operated by banks and or acquirers in their communications and a block cipher streams conception. Enhancing the existing infrastructure resulted in reduced finding error time during new features development.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

This project was entirely led by Sumup. However it wouldn't be successful without the technical expertise provided by Quanterall.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I was impressed with their motivation and professionalism.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing that I can think of

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Logistic and freight forwarding company

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Quanterall, and what were your goals?

We hired Quanterall for developing integrated software for follow up, invoicing and fleet/equipment management.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We did research within our area of business and choose Quanterall

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

4 steps: 1. Detailed project development and explanation of the internal workflow 2. Basic functionality programing 3. Connecting processes in the software 4. Testing

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

4 people

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The project is currently in the last stage of testing. The complicity of the software and time taken resulted in changes during the process dictated by changes in company business strategy. This reflected some functionalities that needed to be remodelled.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Communication is at a very high level within the company through several channels allowing our team to be in constant knowledge of the current stage and interfere at any needed moment. Quanterall team acts with flexibility which is appreciated by us as a customer.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Adequate ideas regarding our workflow processes and turn them into software improvements.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

whatever was needed was taken into consideration and reflected the process at the time