Dune Protocol

Basics

• Has merged with Free TON (9-2-2021). The Dune devs will now focus on Free TON.
• According to the announcement post, Origin Labs will develop Dune. The CEO of this company comes from OCalmPro, which is named by others to develop this fork.
• From this post by The Block:

"French engineering group, OcamlPro, is pursuing a Tezos fork after the token's managing foundation threatened to stop funding them over governance concerns, according to a blog post by the Tezos Commons Foundation. OcamlPro's leadership is said to have partnered with a newly registered crypto fund, Starchain Capital, in order to fork Tezos and to create a new blockchain called Dune Protocol. According to a leaked email allegedly sent by Starchain Capital, it is currently creating an SPV to raise $1m for 5% of the total token supply to fund the operations. The fork is scheduled for September 2019.

OCamlPro had been receiving funding from the Tezos Foundation as part of their grant program, working on Tezos-related projects such as Liquidity and its block explorer, TzScan. However, tensions began to arise after it emerged OCamlPro was not fully open-sourcing its software, which is one of the conditions for financing grantees. The Tezos Foundation made it known that the funding, which expired in Q2 of this year, would be halted unless this criteria was met.

The Tezos protocol has been lauded as a solution to solve proposal disputes through its on-chain governance mechanism. However its software is open source, meaning anyone can fork from it."

• In a blog post Tezos Commons Foundation claimed:

"The main Tezos engineers who were originally at OCamlPro are now working at Nomadic Labs, not OCamlPro." The post also mentioned: "They did not create OCaml."

• The post also goes on claiming OcalmPro and Starchain are forking for money:

"This alleged email evidence, read in full here, suggests that Dune protocol is not a principled hard fork. Starchain Capital describes a liquidation event planned for later this year. What is described as an opportunity is set up to provide a quick turnaround for investors and OCamlPro leadership.

Projection:
Low: day1, the fork captures 5% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$50m valuation
(liquidity event)
Middle: day1, the fork captures 20% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$200m
valuation (liquidity event)
Good: day1, the fork captures 40% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$400m
valuation (liquidity event)"

Tezos Foundation reaction to the Fork

• On 17-6-2019 Tezos Commons announced: "Tezos Foundation to give away ledger Nano S wallets to all fundraiser contributors for the celebration of 1 year launch"
• From this reddit post by TzLibre:

"This announcement was sent on Jun 17th via email to 30K contributors, the very same day someone posted on Reddit the bombshell unofficial announcement of Dune. Tezos Stiftung is trying to distract contributors from this news, which is a perfect example of their total failure as managers."