OCamlPro
Basics
"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."
- From a blog post Tezos Commons Foundation:
"During this period numerous debates arose in the Tezos Community surrounding TzScan and Liquidity’s licensing agreement. OCamlPro leadership started publicly accusing the Tezos Foundation of ‘blacklisting’ them from their grant program.
They appear to have purposefully stirred the community over the fear of Liquidity to be a paid licensed product, and not free or open source. The reasoning given was they had not received further grants to support their development. They received grants in the past, and were in at that time in negotiation regarding future grants with the Tezos Foundation, but the reasoning as to why they had not been approved remained a mystery to the broader community. A segment of the community sided with OCamlPro without knowing the full context.
This sparked a large debate on whether or not all Tezos grantees should be making their software open source because many features of TzScan also were not, and eventually fizzled out for the most part as they decided to change their Liquidity license to a free one, even if still not MIT."
- In the 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 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)"
Team
Fabrice Le Fessant; former team member and founder. Now CEO of Origin Labs
