OCamlPro’s TzScan grant proposal accepted by the Tezos Foundation – joint press release

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Tezos Foundation and OCamlPro joint press release - October 17, 2018

We are pleased to announce that the Tezos Foundation has issued a grant to OCamlPro to support its work on TzScan, a block explorer for the Tezos blockchain that will be made open-source.

OCamlPro is a French company and R&D lab, focused on OCaml and blockchain development. OCamlPro, which is an active community member and contributor to Tezos, has initiated several Tezos-related projects such as TzScan and Liquidity, a high-level programming language for creating smart contracts in Tezos with an online editor, compiler and debugger, and features a decompiler to audit Michelson contracts.

Open-source block explorers are a key component of a blockchain ecosystem by allowing users to more easily monitor transactions, network validators (“bakers”), and the health of a network. OCamlPro will also provide documentation on Tezos and continue to improve the TzScan API, which may be used by applications such as wallets.

The Tezos Foundation’s core mission is to support the long-term success of the Tezos protocol and ecosystem. By funding projects imagined by scientists, researchers, developers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, the Foundation encourages decentralized development and robust participation.

More information here.

Curious about OCamlPro's blockchain activities?

OCamlPro is a French software company and R&D lab, born in 2011 and located in Paris and Essonne. We are dedicated to improving the quality of software, through the use of formal methods, and we promote the use of OCaml, a fast and expressive, statically typed state-of-the-art programming language, matured for more than 30 years in the French public research lab Inria.

In 2014, OCamlPro has been involved in the Tezos project, helping with the Tezos protocol design and developing the prototype of Tezos, later to become the official Tezos software. In 2017, OCamlPro developed the ICO infrastructure for Tezos, including Bitcoin and Ethereum smart-contracts. OCamlPro self-funded two big projects around Tezos:

• The TzScan block-explorer for Tezos: TzScan provides many features specific to Tezos delegated proof-of-stake protocol, to make life easier for bakers. TzScan API can be used by applications, such as wallets and delegation services to provide additional information to their users.
• The Liquidity language for Tezos smart-contracts. Liquidity is a programming language, compiled to Michelson. Its online editor can be used to write, deploy, run and debug smart contracts. It also features a decompiler from Michelson, that can be used to audit contracts written in other languages.

In 2018, OCamlPro worked with the Tezos Foundation and Tezos Core Development team to prepare the launch of the betanet network, and later, the mainnet network.

With a team of 10 PhD-level developers working on Tezos, OCamlPro is one of the biggest spot of knowledge on Tezos. OCamlPro can provide many services to the Tezos community: improvement of Tezos software, development of specific software, features and new protocols, training and consulting and smart contract design, writing, and auditing. With tight connections with Inria and other French research labs and universities, OCamlPro is also involved in several research projects, related to blockchains or formal methods:

• Formal methods: OCamlPro is involved in collaborative projects with academic and industrial partners to develop tools for software verification, such as the Alt-Ergo SMT Solver (from LRI).
• OCaml tooling: we help optimize OCaml (flambda) and design development tools for OCaml (open-source most of the time). Such tools range from command-line tools (such as OPAM or ocp-build), or GUI tools (the OCaml Memory Profiler), to web-based tools (TryOCaml, the OCaml MOOC with the learn-OCaml platform of the OCaml Foundation of Inria).

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About OCamlPro:

OCamlPro is a R&D lab founded in 2011, with the mission to help industrial users benefit from experts with a state-of-the-art knowledge of programming languages theory and practice.

• We provide audit, support, custom developer tools and training for both the most modern languages, such as Rust, Wasm and OCaml, and for legacy languages, such as COBOL or even home-made domain-specific languages;
• We design, create and implement software with great added-value for our clients. High complexity is not a problem for our PhD-level experts. For example, we helped the French Income Tax Administration re-adapt and improve their internally kept M language, we designed a DSL to model and express revenue streams in the Cinema Industry, codename Niagara, and we also developed the prototype of the Tezos proof-of-stake blockchain from 2014 to 2018.
• We have a long history of creating open-source projects, such as the Opam package manager, the LearnOCaml web platform, and contributing to other ones, such as the Flambda optimizing compiler, or the GnuCOBOL compiler.
• We are also experts of Formal Methods, developing tools such as our SMT Solver Alt-Ergo (check our Alt-Ergo Users' Club) and using them to prove safety or security properties of programs.

Please reach out, we'll be delighted to discuss your challenges: contact@ocamlpro.com or book a quick discussion.