THREE QUESTIONS TO MICHEL MAUNY, PRESIDENT OF NOMADIC LABS

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Who are you?

I’m Michel Mauny, President of Nomadic Labs.

I started as an Inria researcher and led the group that created the OCaml programming language. I spent one year as a professor of Computer Science at NYU in 2000, and worked in ENSTA-Paris (a French engineering school) for eleven years from 2005. I returned to Inria in 2016 to create the OCaml Software Foundation and became General Manager of the Inria Foundation in 2018.

I have been interested in the Tezos project since the beginning, and I joined the Board of the Tezos Foundation in February 2018. Then, in January 2019, I left Inria again to join Nomadic Labs as Chief Scientific Officer and I left the Board of the Tezos Foundation at the end of April 2020 to be appointed as Président (French for CEO for such an organization) in May 2020.

What is Nomadic Labs?

Nomadic Labs is a research and development company for distributed, decentralized and formally verified software, based in Paris.

We help build Tezos, the self-amendable blockchain, using tools and techniques for the production of safe and high-quality code.

We also carry out original research with some of the strongest research institutes in Europe, such as Inria in France and the IMDEA Software Institute in Spain.

Finally, our Adoption and Support department helps promote the Tezos blockchain ecosystem. We are committed to inclusion, working as much as possible with service providers such as integrators and tokenization platforms to efficiently respond to requests from companies wishing to develop dApps on the Tezos platform.

We have a team of more than 50 people, and we are proud of how we mix industrial and academic skills, and of our collegiate and collaborative working environment.

Nomadic Labs is an active member of the Tezos ecosystem, and we are happy to be part of a robust, diverse and flourishing community that includes actors from all around the world!

How do you see the large-scale scenario for the adoption of the Blockchain?

I expect blockchain usage to evolve like the Internet. Specifically, blockchain will be to value as the internet was to information: a shared infrastructure that streamlines exchanges.

Natural use cases of blockchain technologies mainly come from finance and include payment tokens (XTZ, for Tezos), the tokenization of assets and post-trade settlements, and the more advanced usages which are now collectively called Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

By making transactions fluid and clear, the blockchain will favor the emergence of novel use cases that are difficult to imagine today. I remember receiving and sending e-mails back in the early eighties and it was clear this was going to change the world, but we could never have imagined the Internet as it is today!

Blockchain is evolving rapidly and Tezos’ self-amendment and on-chain governance are designed specifically to give it the adaptability to keep up and integrate the best technological advances (where, perhaps, other blockchains might struggle to do so).

Tezos’ future is bright!