Funding differences, team internal strife, Tezos "hard fork" mystery

Following the internal strife among the founding team and the turmoil of illegal securities, the PoS star project Tezos has recently ushered in a new crisis.

OcamlPro, one of the development teams in the Tezos ecosystem, announced that it will hard fork Tezos in September this year to generate a new chain "Dune chain". If the hard fork is successful, this will be the first time in the history of the development of the entire POS consensus mechanism. A hard fork that produces a second new chain.

If you don’t understand the Tezos ecosystem, you may not know who the protagonist “OcamlPro” of this hard fork is, but the products they developed for Tezos are indeed better known than the team, including Tzscan, the most commonly used browser on Tezos, and Tezos Liquidity, one of the smart contract development languages ​​(Tezos' current smart contracts include Michealson and Liquidity languages).

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Money becomes the fuse

Disagreement was revealed a month ago.

On May 2, the Tezos Foundation published an article on the official website about "Supporting Ecological Open Source Smart Contract Development Plan", and decided to support more development teams developing smart contracts and block browsers in the Tezos ecosystem. A sentence in the article mentioned: Tezos is negotiating with OCamlPro, the developer of TzScan, to decide whether to provide follow-up maintenance funds after the funding expires at the end of the second quarter.

There is no further mention in the article of the reason and process of this negotiation.

But then the foundation posted on Reddit, explaining the content of the negotiations: the foundation's funding for TzScan will expire at the end of the second quarter. The two parties are currently in good faith talks on TzScan's follow-up funding application. The Tezos Foundation, as the funding provider, requires all grantees to fully open source the code base. Only when this goal is achieved can any additional, reasonable funding applications be considered; and only when the above open source requirements are met, other tools will be considered (such as liquidity language) for funding applications.

The implication is that the two are stuck on whether TzScan is fully open source for subsequent funding.

Subsequently, OcamlPro founder Fabrice Le Fessant responded to the post, rebutting that since 2017, the amount of OCamlPro's contribution to TzScan and Liquidity is more than twice the amount of grants provided by the Tezos Foundation. Using their development tools, the Tezos community has developed many independent projects (wallets, nodes, websites, dapps).

According to the meaning of the foundation, OcamlPro can only apply for subsequent small donations if it is developed locally regardless of cost. "I'm (although) a software developer, a computer scientist, not a businessman, and none of it sounds like a win-win proposal," he said.

The grant money became a trigger for the contradiction between the two to become public, and it also planted the seeds of division in the community.

In fact, this is not the first time that funding disagreements have arisen.

In early May, some developers discovered that the code of a project called "irontez" developed by OCamlPro was completely deleted from the gitlab repository. The project is dedicated to the storage optimization of Tezos nodes.

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proposal storm

Funding negotiations have not yet broken down, and OcamlPro's new proposal has attracted controversy.

On May 30, the PoS public chain project Tezos announced that it had successfully activated the "Athens A" proposal through on-chain voting, and completed the mainnet upgrade.

This represents an important step in Tezos' decentralized governance, but it also means that new proposals will enter the voting cycle.

The original plan was that, in order to take full advantage of the 3-month cycle, the three main development teams: Nomadic Labs, Cryptium Labs, Marigold would collaborate with other developers to coordinate the development of upcoming proposals. And prepare to submit the proposal at the end of June, giving the community ample time to review the discussion over the next 24 days.

OcamlPro, which did not participate in the cooperation, took the lead in proposing a new amendment called Brest A on June 10, including a fix for a security problem and a tool problem.

But such practices have been questioned by developers.

In the governance process of Tezos, a proposal needs to go through four stages: Proposal, Exploration, Testing and Promotion, which last for 3 months. The first submission of the OcamlPro proposal may delay the approval of the former proposal.

Skeptical voices believe that the OcamlPro proposal is more like a "bug patch" with other improvements. At this early stage of Tezos' life, this small proposal does not make good use of the entire 3-month voting cycle. If this patch is combined with other If more beneficial suggestions are included together, it will serve the community better; moreover, the time of Ocamlpro submission does not meet the needs of the community, and the community does not have enough time for education and discussion.

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two sides to choke

e-maile-mailPushed the differences between the two parties to a climax.

According to the email, Starchain Capital will cooperate with OcamlPro to fork the Tezos blockchain in September 2019 and claim a new public chain. Before that, they will raise $1 million to form a team and complete the development work. It is also said that after the hard fork, under special circumstances, the forked chain can surpass the parent chain and become the main chain project.

The letter did not forget to mention the controversial history of Tezos founder Arthur Breitman, and also stated that OcamlPro founder Fabrice Le Fessant is Arthur Breitman's teacher; in addition, OcamlPro has made more than 90% of Tezos' contributions. OCamlPro decided to leave Tezos due to lack of financial support, different vision and disagreement with the Tezos Foundation on the governance plan.

Although the authenticity of this email has yet to be verified, it was still received by Shaun Belcher, executive director of Tezos Commons.long counterattack。

The beginning of the article emphasizes that the problem is not that they plan to fork Tezos, and that anyone can use the open source Tezos software; the problem is that the leadership of OCamlPro "maliciously and distorts historical behavior."

In order to prove that the intention of forking OCamlPro is real, Shaun Belcher listed 4 pictures of files in the article. Including a business registration document for the creation of a new company "Origin Labs" in France on May 27, 2019, which named Fabrice Le Fessant, founder of OCamlPro, as President;

A fundraising request written by Starchain Capital for "Dune chain";

A Delaware Certificate of Incorporation of Spoon SPV, LLC, incorporated by Starchain Capital on May 20, 2019;

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Left: Origin Labs Business Registration Documents / Right: Spoon SPV, LLC Delaware Certificate of Incorporation

The article believes that OCamlPro publicly accused and mobilized supporters to split the community a month ago, but it was just to create momentum for its new forked chain.

The second part of the article clarifies some statements: 1. OCamlPro is not the engineering team behind the OCaml language; 2. Tezos is a decentralized project, and the founder is not the leader; 3. Fabrice Le Fessant, the founder of OcamlPro, is not Arthur Breitman OCamlPro is recommended by others; 4. 90% contribution is too exaggerated, and Nomadic Labs, Obsidian Systems, Japanese team DaiLambda and Taiwanese team Nine Chapters participated in the development.

In the end, the article also listed many unreasonable demands made during the negotiation between OCamlPro and Tezos, including the communications of the Tezos Foundation must be approved by the leadership of OCamlPro, financial support for project development without requiring development results and deadlines, long vacations of more than 4 weeks, etc. etc., they are obliged to provide threats of removal of intellectual property if the demands are not met.

At the end of the article, I still thank the OCamlPro engineers for their hard work and hope that despite this, they can still actively participate in the Tezos community.

This counterattack article was published yesterday (June 17), and OcamlPro has not responded yet.

The hard fork of Tezos has attracted heated discussions in the community: some people are optimistic, thinking that Tezos is not perfect, the foundation is making slow progress in promoting Tezos, and OCP cannot be underestimated; some people are not optimistic, saying that the hard fork must fail; more people It's a pity that OCamlPro is a group of talented people who have done great things for Tezos. If the communication is smooth, the Tezos ecosystem will be better.

However, team infighting does not seem to be the first time Tezos has encountered. After the ICO in 2017, the Tezos founder couple and Johann Gevers, the chairman of the foundation appointed by Tezos, also broke down in cooperation. People can't help but sigh, is Tezos pointless or poor management? Maybe it's time for the Tezos team to think about this issue.