Inria annonces a partnership with the Tezos Foundation, which has just announced its support for the OCaml Foundation, and has committed funds for a group of experienced Inria researchers to review the Tezos codebase.

The Tezos Foundation’s primary focus is the promotion and development of the Tezos protocol (a decentralized blockchain forming a true digital community) and related technologies, as well as the promotion and support of applications using the Tezos protocol. The Tezos Foundation also promotes the development of new technologies and applications in the areas of open and decentralized software architectures.

On March 2, 2018, the Tezos Foundation brought its official support to the ‘Learn-OCaml’ project of the future OCaml Foundation, under the auspices of the Inria Foundation. The Tezos blockchain project, supported by the Tezos Foundation, intensively uses the OCaml programming language, developed at Inria. The Tezos Foundation shares with the OCaml Foundation the desire to see an increased use of the language, particularly in higher education, in order to prepare generations of well-trained Ocaml programmers and therefore meet the growing needs of the labour market in this area.

The Tezos Foundation has also committed funds allowing a group of experienced researchers to review the Tezos codebase. Tezos implements, in OCaml, complex peer-to-peer protocols, distributed consensus and self-modifying code. Inria has strong expertise in these topics, and a team of Inria researchers is currently reviewing the Tezos code, seeking to limit the risk of anomalies compromising the reliability or security of the Tezos protocol.