On June 30, almost a year after the widely successful ICO — a project that raised $232 million worth of BTC and ETH back in July 2017, setting a record at the time — which was followed by an internal dispute and several class-action lawsuits, the Tezos Foundation has finally launched its beta network[1]. Here’s how the project started, what caused the infamous delay and why the anticipated launch comes with reservations.
‘The last cryptocurrency’: What is Tezos?
Tezos was developed by Arthur Breitman, who studied applied mathematics, computer science and physics in France and later moved to the U.S. to study financial mathematics. His wife, Kathleen Breitman, a former employee at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and at R3 — an enterprise software firm which focuses on distributed database technology — has also contributed to the project. The couple met at a Anarcho-Capitalist Meetup (where Breitman is still listed as a co-organizer) in New York in 2010 and married in 2013.
In August 2014, Arthur Breitman published two white papers[2], in which he stressed Bitcoin’s defects, predicted the mass production of tokens and outlined his own blockchain solution: the world’s first “self-amending” cryptocurrency called Tezos — the name was generated via Breitman’s algorithm that sought to find the names of unclaimed domains pronounceable in English. The second paper[3] read:
“While the irony of preventing the fragmentation of cryptocurrencies by releasing a new one does not escape us… Tezos truly aims to be the last cryptocurrency.”
According to the technical papers, Tezos is a distributed, peer-to-peer, permissionless network, whose system is based on smart contracts similar to Ethereum (ETH). However, Tezo’s structure is allegedly more advanced: its protocol has the ability to evolve and implement new innovations over time, without the
