Q&A with OCTO Technology Senior Blockchain Developer Aymeric Bethencourt
This week, we caught up with OCTO Technology Senior Blockchain Developer Aymeric Bethencourt to discuss the OCTO team’s work on Tezos, their relationship with Accenture Digital, and what drew them to build on Tezos.
What is OCTO? How is it related to the rest of Accenture?
OCTO is an IT Delivery and Consulting company based in Paris, France. We are a company of 600 people working on multiple IT subjects, including Blockchain. In 2017, OCTO was acquired by Accenture.
What are you all working on at the moment?
We are working on 3 new projects with Tezos regarding NFT, e-learning and a wallet. We also work with other public and private blockchains on a central bank currency project, a stable coin project, and doing security audits of smart contracts with added formal verification when necessary.
Any new updates to Tezos Academy, Tezos Land, and Tezos Link?
Tezos Academy (TezosAcademy.io) is a fun learning platform with gamified elements and a live coding editor for exercises. It has just reached the end of its second round of developments which added 10 new chapters to the courses, totaling 30 chapters in the development of Smart Contracts with Tezos and LIGO. New features have also been added, like progress tracking and a completion badge.
Tezos Link (TezosLink.io) is a node as a service platform allowing any Dapp developers to access the Tezos network without having to manage a node. Tezos link has also recently completed its second round of developments which added support for the Carthage testnet and speed optimizations using a mix of Tezos rolling nodes and full nodes to answer requests. The Delphi testnet should also arrive soon.
Finally Tezos Land is currently in active development and will release sometime in December. It is a NFT boilerplate based on FA2 that developers will be able to easily fork to start their own NFT marketplace from.
All projects are free and open-source!
How did you get involved with Tezos and what drew you to it?
As a French company, we were first drawn to Tezos because of its french origins, and also because its decentralized governance and formal verification features were very interesting and different from other blockchains. Also, at the time, there were few educational platforms for Tezos and our developers really liked learning Ethereum on CryptoZombies so we thought: Why not create something similar on Tezos? We contacted Tezos and offered to develop such a platform. We quickly followed up with another offer for Tezos Link, as Tezos was clearly missing easy API access to its network, whereas Ethereum was being very successful with Infura. Since then, we’ve been very active with Tezos and are continuing to develop the ecosystem with them.
What three things are you most excited to see built on Tezos?
DeFi is obviously the big buzzword at the moment and we’re excited to see more DeFi services on Tezos like decentralized exchanges, atomic swap platforms, synthetics, etc… We also like non-fungible tokens so we’d be happy to see new NFT marketplaces pop up, which is why we are building Tezos Land in the first place. Finally, we think it is important that Tezos keeps on improving its speed, gas pricing and interoperability in order to keep up with the new generation of blockchains currently in development, e.g. Avalanche, Polkadot, Cosmos, etc… and Delphi did a great job at it!
Additional Ecosystem Updates:
We are thrilled to share that we have translated the September 2020 Biannual Report into 5 more languages: Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Japanese, Russian and Ukrainian. You can find the translations here. Below are additional updates from around the ecosystem:
- Aquarchain announced that they are building a real estate investment platform on Tezos to issue and manage digital tokens representing real estate assets.
- Blockwatch Data released TzStats v2.1 with Tezos smart contract data display, token support, and more.
- Tezos developer Claude Barde published a blog post exploring the Batch API tool for Tezos Taquito.
- Madfish Solutions released a new version of the Thanos Wallet with Delphi support along with new functionality designed to improve UX and DevX.
- Marigold Lead Developer Gabriel Alfour announced in an Agora post that Ebetanet, the Edo preview network, is now available.
- Metastate published an article about two proposed features to enhance the Tezos governance mechanism, the 5th adoption period and shorter voting periods.
- Nomadic Labs announced a new series of Nomadic Labs Research Seminars and released the first seminar on practical proofs in Tezos with Juvix.
- Nomadic Labs announced that Sword France has become a corporate baker on Tezos.
- Nomadic Labs announced that Tezos has been selected for a project to explore the development of a Digital Interbank Currency..
- Nomadic Labs announced that they are discontinuing support and maintenance of the mobile wallet, Cortez, effective February 16, 2021.
- Tezos early architect Arthur Breitman spoke at Hong Kong Blockchain Week.
- Tezos Commons released episode 13 of TezTalks Radio featuring Tezos early architect Arthur Breitman.
- Tezos Commons published a deep dive into Keefer Taylor and Luke Youngblood’s stable coin project and how it will benefit the Tezos ecosystem
- Tezos Commons released issue 29 of the Baking Sheet, with community updates.
- The maintainers of the Tezos Reward Distributor (TRD) released v8.0 of TRD with Delphi support and new features like a plugin system, Dexter support, and frozen payouts with TzKT.
- TQ Tezos announced that new Tezos Foundation Council Members Chris Wright and Anil Madhavapeddy will join next week’s TQuorum.
- TQ Tezos hosted the latest Tezos Town Hall as part of their TQuorum series.
- Vertalo and MountX announced the completion of the first ever successful tokenization of real estate in Mexico, which was done on Tezos.
FAQs
Last week, we prepared a standalone Q&A document to answer a number of questions that we frequently receive from the community. Moving forward, we anticipate this being a living document that we will update in real time as more questions arise within the ecosystem. You can find the Q&A here. Additionally, our community manager Robert Fontaine answers community questions in real time on Twitter, Reddit, Agora, Telegram, etc.