{"id":37345,"date":"2020-08-04T15:51:18","date_gmt":"2020-08-04T12:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=37345"},"modified":"2025-08-29T15:47:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T12:47:44","slug":"what-is-tezos-xtz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u1f987.com\/en\/what-is-tezos-xtz\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Tezos (XTZ)?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What is Tezos?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Attention! The article is outdated and awaiting an update.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Tezos is a multifunctional decentralised blockchain platform with smart-contract support and the ability to create tokens and decentralised applications.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Who created Tezos, and when? <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Tezos was created by Arthur Breitman, son of the well-known French playwright, writer and actor Jean-Claude Dere. Arthur Breitman studied applied mathematics, computer science and physics at the \u00c9cole Polytechnique in Paris, then moved to the United States to study financial mathematics at New York University. He worked at the investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and at Google X and Waymo.<\/p>\n

For several years, Breitman helped organise seminars and meet-ups of anarcho-capitalists in New York. Participants in this movement styled themselves as \u201cradical libertarians advocating unfettered capital accumulation, intensive technological progress and high living standards of the capitalist system,\u201d as well as a rejection of confrontation with the state.<\/p>\n

At another anarcho-capitalist meeting in 2010, Breitman met American student Kathleen McCaffrey from New Jersey. Arthur and Kathleen married in 2013. After graduating from Cornell University, Kathleen worked at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, at Accenture and at R3 CEV, a company specialising in distributed databases. From the outset of Tezos\u2019s development, Kathleen assisted her husband on the project.<\/p>\n

In August 2014, Arthur Breitman, under the pseudonym \u201cL. M. Goodman,\u201d published a memorandum<\/a> devoted to Tezos, and in September 2014 the project\u2019s white paper<\/a>. The pseudonym L. M. Goodman alluded to Newsweek journalist Leah McGrath Goodman, who became known after attributing the authorship of Bitcoin to Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, an American of Japanese origin.<\/p>\n

In the memorandum and white paper, the Breitmans noted weaknesses in Bitcoin such as its inability to provide a more inclusive governance system and the creation of new tokens, predicted that many flash-in-the-pan tokens would soon appear, and presented their own blockchain solution: Tezos, billed as the world\u2019s first \u201cself-amending\u201d cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n

The cryptocurrency\u2019s name was generated by Breitman\u2019s algorithm, which searched for pronounceable, unclaimed domain names in English.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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How has Tezos developed?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In 2015, the Breitmans founded Dynamic Ledger Solutions (DLS) to write Tezos\u2019s source code. At the time, Breitman was a quantitative finance specialist at Morgan Stanley. Not wishing to risk his job, he chose not to disclose his involvement in the project (he left the bank in April 2016).<\/p>\n

When registering the company in the United States, Breitman, in violation of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) rules, failed to disclose his participation in \u201cother business activities\u201d. As a result, in April 2018 FINRA fined him $20,000 and barred him for two years from associating with broker-dealers.<\/p>\n

In 2016, DLS released the project\u2019s source code. In February 2017, an alpha network of the protocol was launched<\/a> based on that code.<\/p>\n

Because Swiss law permits the creation, for the public benefit, of independent foundations to support open-source software platforms, a non-profit Tezos Foundation was registered<\/a> in Zug. The Breitmans asked South African entrepreneur Johann Gevers, founder of the Swiss fintech company Monetas, to serve as the foundation\u2019s president.<\/p>\n

The foundation obtained control over the project\u2019s crowdsale proceeds; intellectual property was controlled by the Breitmans\u2019 company, DLS.<\/p>\n

After the ICO, the Breitmans planned to sell DLS to the Tezos Foundation, after which control over Tezos\u2019s source code would pass to the foundation\u2019s leadership. However, by the time the ICO, scheduled for May 2017, was due to start, the project was short of funds. Kathleen Breitman turned to venture capitalist Tim Draper, who invested $1.5m via Draper Associates and received a minority stake in DLS.<\/p>\n

On 1 July 2017, the Tezos ICO began: over two weeks, 32,000 users purchased approximately 607.8m XTZ tokens, created and distributed at the moment the genesis block was formed in the Tezos network upon the beta launch. The organisers raised around $232m in bitcoin and ether (although they had planned to raise at most $20m).<\/p>\n

According to the official data on the Tezos Foundation website<\/a>, tokens were distributed as follows:<\/p>\n