Tezos Commons Exec Raises Concerns Over Suspicious Activity by Hard Fork Developers

Members of the community around decentralized platform Tezos have raised concerns about an alleged upcoming hard fork of its blockchain. The issue appeared in a blog post by Tezos Commons executive director Shaun Belcher on June 17.

Discussing what he described as evidence of collusion between two third-party entities, Belcher warned that the hard fork, planned for September, was an attempt to split Tezos user sentiment.

The parties involved are the management team of OCamlPro, a French programming language, and blockchain fund Starchain Capital, which Belcher intimates as mysterious.

“It’s worth remembering that anyone can fork the Tezos software, which is open source,” Belcher wrote. He added:

“The issue is not that they intend to fork Tezos, but the alleged manner in which OCamlPro leadership conducted itself, in bad faith, and misrepresentation of historical behavior to be in the best interest of the community.”

The dispute centers around several areas, including claims made by OCamlPro in correspondence with Starchain.

Its founder, Fabrisse Le Lessant, for instance, claims he mentored Tezos’ co-founder, Arthur Breitman.

“They did not create OCaml, Fabrice was not the ‘teacher’ of Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman, and the main Tezos engineers who were originally at OCamlPro are now working at Nomadic Labs, not OCamlPro,” Belcher highlights.

The real issue stems from the apparent links between Le Lessant and Starchain, which appeared as a United States registered company just weeks ago.

Uploading copies of related documents, Belcher reinforced existing suspicions on social media that the entire hard fork was a calculated move.

“If any of these assumptions formed from these revelations are incorrect, we strongly urge Fabrice and others from OCamlPro to address these concerns,” he concluded.

Hard forks have succeeded in sparking community division in the past. Notably, the bitcoin cash (BCH) fork of the bitcoin (BTC) blockchain delivered two opposing forces which initially panicked markets in 2017.

BCH then itself hard forked in November 2018, creating an opposing faction within the user base while also sending ripples through BTC markets.