Q&A with OCTO Technology Senior Blockchain Developer Aymeric Bethencourt

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!