Tezos

Lore & Background

Tezos was first proposed in 2014 and created by husband-and-wife team Arthur and Kathleen Breitman. Arthur Breitman released two papers under the pseudonym 'L. M. Goodman' while working at Morgan Stanley in 2014. He chose the name 'Tezos' after writing a program to list unclaimed websites that could be pronounced in English. In 2015, he registered Dynamic Ledger Solutions, Inc. (DLS) in Delaware. In March 2014, he contracted French firm OCamlPro to help conceive the protocol and develop the prototype and ICO infrastructure. Arthur was fined $20,000 for not notifying Morgan Stanley of his work. By 2014, he left Morgan Stanley, and Tezos received $612,000 from 10 backers. The Breitmans received a $1.5 million investment from Tim Draper and hired public relations firm Strange Brew. The Tezos Foundation was established in Zug, Switzerland, on April 17, 2017, by Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, Swiss law firm MME, and Johann Gevers. On July 1, 2017, the Tezos Foundation raised $232 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum in an ICO. By October, the Breitmans and Gevers were in dispute over control. Gevers resigned in 2018 and received $400,000. Tezos went live that September. In 2020, the Tezos Foundation paid $25 million to settle lawsuits. Arthur Breitman joined the foundation's council in 2021. In 2022, the foundation launched a $1 million fund to collect NFTs by African and Asian artists.

In Their Own Story

Deep within the silent hum of a global server farm, a baker node caught the signal. It wasn't a transaction or a transfer, but an amendment proposal reaching its crescendo. The validator scanned the ledger; the threshold was met, the consensus absolute. There was no shouting match in a Discord channel, no frantic coordination on Twitter, and no risk of a chain split. In a heartbeat, the protocol logic shifted seamlessly across thousands of nodes. The network state updated in perfect unison—a silent, frictionless evolution that required no fork, caused zero downtime, and marked another chapter in Tezos' endless, self-correcting story.

Reader's Guide

The primary protocol of Tezos utilizes liquid proof of stake (LPoS) and supports Turing-complete smart contracts in a domain-specific language called Michelson. Michelson is a purely functional stack-based language with a reduced instruction set and no side effects, designed with formal verification in mind. The Tezos protocol allows itself to be amended by a staged process of submitting proposals and voting on changes. The Tezos blockchain has been used for NFTs as an alternative to more energy-intensive projects such as Ethereum.

Did You Know?

• Arthur Breitman studied applied mathematics, computer science, and physics in France and financial mathematics at New York University under Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• Kathleen Breitman studied at Cornell University and worked at a hedge fund and as a consultant.
• Arthur was the leader of an anarcho-capitalist group in New York, and Kathleen was a libertarian Republican; they met at a crypto-anarchist lunch in 2010 and married in 2013.
• In mid-2021, Tezos signed a sponsorship deal with Red Bull Racing, which ended in December 2022.
• In October 2021, Tezos became a sponsor of the New York Mets.