Tezos

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Tezos is an

Tezos, first proposed in 2014, was created by husband-and-wife team Arthur and Kathleen Breitman.[5] While working at Morgan Stanley in 2014, Arthur Breitman released two papers proposing a new type of blockchain under the pseudonym "L. M Goodman", referencing a journalist at Newsweek who had misidentified the creator of Bitcoin.^[6] He chose the name "Tezos" after writing a program to list unclaimed websites that could be pronounced in English.^[6] In 2015, with the goal of developing Tezos, Arthur Breitman registered a company called Dynamic Ledger Solutions Inc (DLS) in Delaware, with himself as chief executive.^[5] He contracted French firm OCamlPro to help develop the software.^[6] Arthur worked at Morgan Stanley at the time, but he did not provide them with notice of his work on Tezos as required by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA),^[5] and he was eventually fined $20,000.^[7] He sought to raise $5 to $10 million from banks but was unable to find backers. By 2016, he left Morgan Stanley; Tezos received $612,000 from 10 backers while the Breitmans planned for an initial coin offering (ICO).^[5]

They received a $1.5 million investment from Tim Draper and hired public relations firm Strange Brew to promote their project.^[5] The firm was alleged to have falsely claimed that large American financial firms were using Tezos.^[6][8]

Tezos Foundation and initial coin offering

In 2011, Arthur Breitman first met South African cryptocurrency entrepreneur Johann Gevers through his friend Patri Friedman, the founder of The Seasteading Institute, who had hired Gevers for a project which Breitman had followed closely.^[6] In 2016, the Tezos Foundation was established in Zug Switzerland by Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, Swiss law firm MME and Gevers, to support an initial coin offering (ICO) for the Tezos platform.^[5][6] They planned for the foundation to become a non-profit that would raise money through the ICO and acquire DLS, which owned the group's technology.^[6]

In addition to Switzerland's relatively lax financial oversight and effectively zero corporate tax rate, the benefits for Tezos of being in a foundation under the Swiss Civil Code included the ability to treat fundraising transactions as donations, and acting as an additional layer of institutional security to protect donations.^[6][5][9] Gevers became the foundation's first president.^[6]

On July 1, 2017, the Tezos Foundation raised $232 million in Bitcoin and

By October, the Breitmans and Gevers were in a dispute over control of the project, with the Breitmans alleging Gevers pressured the foundation council into signing a contract giving him a bonus of $1.5 million.[13]^{[14][5] [11][15][16]} Gevers controlled the assets held by the foundation which stood at $820 million by December, including the Breitmans' share.^[17] The disagreements led to delays in the deployment of Tezos, which caused investors to bring lawsuits alleging fraud during the fundraiser and unauthorized sales of securities.^[11][18]

In 2018, Gevers resigned and received $400,000, and the foundation board was replaced; Tezos went live that September.^[6][4]

In 2020, the Tezos founders settled the lawsuits, with the Tezos Foundation paying $25 million, before federal courts ruled on whether the ICO was a sale of unregistered securities.^[19] Arthur Breitman joined the foundation's council in 2021.^[20]

In 2022, The Tezos Foundation launched a £1 million fund to collect NFTs by African and Asian artists, to create a digital art gallery to house the collection, curated by British photographer Misan Harriman.^[21]

Design

The primary protocol of Tezos utilizes liquid

The Tezos protocol allows itself to be amended by a staged process performed by committing operations to the stored blockchain to submit proposals (intended code changes) and to vote on those changes. If a proposal receives enough votes the protocol updates itself to incorporate the code changes.[23]

The Tezos blockchain has been used for

In mid-2021, Tezos had signed a sponsorship deal with Red Bull Racing, which ended as of December 2022.^[25]

In October 2021, Tezos became a sponsor of the New York Mets.^[26]

In February 2022, Tezos sponsored Manchester United in a multi-year deal reportedly worth over £20 million per year.^[27] In November 2022, Manchester United issued NFT digital collectibles on the Tezos blockchain.^[28]

References