Jonas with Fabrice, Muriel and the OCamlPro team in Paris in September

Jonas interviews Fabrice Le Fessant, founder and CEO of OcamlPro. OCPro is a talented OCaml dev team in Paris that developed Tzscan, Liquidy and are a core contributor to the Tezos protocol.

Tell us about OCaml Pro and how your team has been involved with Tezos?

As a researcher in computer science (my fields were P2P, distributed systems, programming languages), I founded OCamlPro 7 years ago. OCamlPro is rooted in the French Computer Science public research ecosystem, as shows our bio at the end of the Foundation’s TZscan grant announcement on our blog.

Arthur Breitman contacted us in March 2014. He had some ideas on how to create a new blockchain. At that time, we didn’t know anything about blockchains, but we were very excited by the project. We helped him transform his ideas into a specification, and then we started implementing a prototype, by iterations approximatively every six months. Finally, early in 2017, most of OCamlPro was working on Tezos, we also developed all the ICO platform for the Tezos Foundation. Of course it was a lot of stress for everybody in the team.

Why did you decide to develop tzscan? What is your vision for that service?

After the ICO, it was decided that the Foundation would continue the development of the Tezos node, the two main developers, Benjamin Canou and Grégoire Henry, joined what would become Nomadic Software, to create a new team to develop Tezos.

The rest of the team had a huge experience in Tezos, so we decided to use that experience to develop the ecosystem, especially since the Foundation was not in capacity to play its role at the end of 2017. It was obvious for us that the most important piece of software for a blockchain, after the blockchain itself, is the block explorer. Even now, we received a grant from the Tezos Foundation, but we think that TzScan could use much more funding, it is one of the most important showcases of Tezos Technology.

There is still a lot of work to do, to provide more information for bakers, for basic users, or to display specific information for the incoming Dapps. It is the entry point to Tezos, for many people.

What is Liquidity and why is it important to Tezos?

During the ICO, most of the team was working on the infrastructure, I felt that I should dive into the Tezos code. As a former researcher in programming languages, I started with Michelson, Tezos smart contract language, and I felt it was a bit too low level as a programming language, so I decided to create a language on top of it, that would keep its good safety properties, but would be easier to use. It was the first version of Liquidity, that has now been improved a lot by the team since that time. One very nice thing about Liquidity is the decompiler : it is able to take a Michelson smart contract, and transform it into a Liquidity program, much easier to read and understand. It also has a nice editor on the web, with a very nice debugger.

Finally, we think it is a good testbed for verification : our team has a huge experience in program verification, that could easily be applied to Liquidity, to build bug-free smart contracts. We have asked a grant for Liquidity to the Tezos Foundation, let’s hope they will support us !

What kinds of services can / will OCP provide to the Tezos community going forward?

Today, there are mostly two teams with an experience both in OCaml and Tezos. It is OCamlPro and Nomadic. As the team at Nomadic will focus on Tezos itself, at OCamlPro, on the other hand, we have a larger focus: we can contribute to Tezos, in OCaml, for example to write the future protocols or to customize Tezos for enterprise deployments, we can also customize our tools, TzScan and Liquidity, for Tezos users, and we can write even more tools for the Tezos ecosystem. Finally, we have an experience of both Michelson and Liquidity, we can easily write smart contracts for end users. Today, we have many things that we would like to do, and we need to prioritize.

What are your favorite ideas for smart contracts or dApps that you would like to see built on Tezos.

On the public blockchain, I think we could already deploy many interesting smart contracts. The gas limit is a bit low for some of them, but I hope it will be increased in the future. There are standard things, such as multi-sig or ERC20 contracts, we have already written some of them in Liquidity. We can expect also that smart contracts could be used to rule the interactions between Tezos actors, for example bakers and their delegators, we have even thought about using smart contracts for TzScan customers.

I am also very interested in using Tezos for enterprise deployments. We have started some experiments, I hope they will be successful.

How can the community get a hold of you?

We usually answer our mail! You can write to contact@ocamlpro.com or contact@tzscan.io.