Tezos (XTZ)

From CryptoWiki

Layer 1 PoS Blockchain

Basics

  • Started in: 2014
  • Mainnet release: 17-9-2018
  • Based in: France
  • "Tezos plans to compete with the existing blockchains by offering a higher security through a technique of formal verification, and a self-amending protocol which will facilitate automatic amendments of protocol without a need for a hard fork. The project has been under development since 2014, and the team planned to launch the network in 4 months after ICO, which was in 7-2017. It launched in September 2018. Using the original source code which was released in 2016 Tezos launched an alphanet in Feb. 2017 prior to their July token sale. While the network was originally planned for a late 2017 launch the betanet did not go live until June 2018 due to disagreements within the foundation which delayed the release of funds to developers. The code was released under open source license. The network token XTZ or Tez that was offered for sale is needed to power smart contracts and to participate in voting."
  • “Tezos is its own blockchain, not a derivative of any other blockchain. We didn’t just fork Bitcoin or Ethereum and add a layer onto it. We built our own from the ground up.”
  • "Tezos has the potential to cover all key use cases of Ethereum offering extra security as a bonus. At the same time, the cost of using Tezos is expected to be higher than that of Ethereum. It means that Tezos is likely to be in demand in cases where high security need dominates. At the same time, there will always be lots of markets where security offered by Ethereum is enough." Check this reddit thread to get deeper into this topic.
  • From Our Network #6 (30-1-2020):

"Funded accounts on Tezos continued to grow by +7% (+24k) throughout January, but the number of economically relevant accounts with more than 100tz balance increased only by 938 to 24.6k, which represents 6.6% of all 376k funded accounts. Overall, the top 1k accounts hold about 67% of total supply which is close to Litecoin (64%) but much higher than Bitcoin (35%)."

History

  • From this blog (27-9-2017):

Tezos is a smart contract platform whose origin dates back to 2014, when Ethereum was just in its early formative stages. So if Tezos was designed to uproot a dominant platform, it would have been Bitcoin. Nonetheless, the original Tezos design was very forward thinking for its time in proposing solutions to governance and scalability problems Bitcoin would later experience as well as providing a higher level language than Bitcoin’s for implementing smart contracts.

Tezos is designed from the ground up as a completely new blockchain that is different from Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Audits & Exploits

"These developers, armed with Gitlab, have done a job in ensuring a development process trending towards network security. Tezos documents massive testing in their repository. We counted 498222 lines of test code. This is the most we’ve ever seen in any repository anywhere. While we see that XTZ makes many of its contracts susceptible to formal verification via the Mi-Cho-Coq theorem, we can’t see a formal verification of Octez itself. Nor could we find an audit of Octez itself."

With over 400 bakers validating the Tezos Network, Tezos is a little low on validator numbers. These nodes appear to be well geographically decentralised. Only Octez is documented.

Bug bounty security is a healthy indicator of security and Tezos doesn’t seem to have one.

Got then updated the very next day with additional information:

"We were happy to see the community’s eagerness to provide information we missed. In light of this, we have updated the Tezos report, which saw a good score increase.

FORMAL VERIFICATION: given this and other feedback, we will be iterating on our chain review in the coming months as we understand Formal Verification on a node software is close to impossibly time consuming.

BUG BOUNTY: while we were made aware of different bounties for the Tezos ecosystem as well as security bounties, we were unable to find a specific amount linked to core code security bounties."

Bugs /Exploits

Governance

Voting

  • Jacob Arluck from of the teams working on Tezos said this about Tezos governance: "We want to be conservative and keep consensus around changes to the protocol, but stay fast moving and not stuck like Bitcoin. You want to start conservative and loosen up along the way, trying not to lose decentralization."
  • Voting on on-chain governance happens in three phases. It takes 3 months, every month 1 vote.
  • Voting rights for the top 10 BPs on Tezos is currently at 28.8% (as of April 13th, 2019)
  • On the question if Tezos with it's delegated proof of stake might end up with cartels (like Lisk):

"On this topic, there’s no shortage of celebrated blog posts forewarning us that on-chain governance is destined for capture by concentrated interests. And there is real evidence to this effect in Lisk. But observers too often extrapolate the experiences of dPOS protocols with fixed size validator sets directly onto Tezos. Rarely do observers note that Tezos features a different model based on different priorities.

None of this is to say that powerful voting coalitions can’t arise, or that large entities, like exchanges, won’t become important stakeholders in Tezos. But what matters most is whether token holders and users can coordinate to rearrange power and hold concentrated interests accountable. Liquid Proof-of-Stake should facilitate this by ensuring the barrier to entry is low enough to maintain a dynamic validator set."

"The over-delegation problem is getting ugly. At Tezos Community, we stopped accepting new KT1 addresses for delegation way back in cycle 26. But as of today, we have 158 delegators with over 1M of new delegations made to us since then. These delegators are not receiving rewards from us - but they still count towards our staking balance. This means that we are more likely to become over-delegated despite our best efforts to mitigate the risk. I feel bad for these delegators because there is no good way to notify them of their mistake. One of the protocol improvements we need to consider is a way for a baker to stop accepting new delegators.

As many bakers become over delegated, the chain will become impacted. As a threat to decentralization, our largest bakers (TF, Polychain, and presumably Draper) will start to earn many steals. Because they bake for themselves, they have lots of bond available to pick up all the steals that the public delegation services will miss. This crisis is going to come to a head over the next 15 cycles."

However it seemed to have worked itself out by as one reddit user put it (29-9-2019):

"Education and information. People eventually figured out they wouldn't get anything if they delegated to an overdelegated baker, and baker who found themselves with unwanted delegation managed ways to get more bonds and profit from the unexpected bounty."

  • From this blog (27-9-2017):

"Tezos proposes that a stake-based democratic process will better retain network effects by avoiding contentious splits while allowing protocol upgrades to keep pace with innovation. Initially, only proposals with a high level of stakeholder support (80% supermajority) will get deployed, which, in theory, should minimize network splits. The democratic process itself comes with some issues. Upgrade proposals are inherently technical; the vast majority of stakeholders won’t be able to directly evaluate what they’re voting on. Instead they will be informed by the explanations of a few who understand the Tezos code, which puts great power in the hands of a small tech-savvy minority. Getting enough stakeholders to vote on any given proposal is another challenge. Tezos is looking to address both these issues with a voting scheme in which stakeholders are free to cast their votes or delegate them to others as they see fit.

A major concern with stake-based voting on arbitrary protocol upgrades is that it can give a small cartel of whales (i.e. entities holding a large stake, such as exchanges) too much power to change the rules and enrich themselves at the expense of non-staking users. The Tezos position paper briefly describes formalizing “constitutionality” by requiring that proposals come with a formal proof that they don’t violate any constitutional properties. It remains to be seen whether such mechanisms are practically possible and how effective they would be at deterring abuses of power that a self-amending governance process allows."

Token

Launch

  • Tezos conducted an ICO from June 28, 2017 to July 13, 2017, in which 65,681 BTC and 361,122 ETH were raised.
  • The ICO set a record for the largest initial coin offering (ICO) of all time up that point – $232 million in July 2017.
  • "Controversially, only investors who provided personal information to TokenSoft, a third-party provider contracted by the foundation, were able to claim their tokens. The foundation did not announce that it would carry out these know-your-customer and anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) checks – which required investors to submit names, phone numbers, addresses, government-issued IDs and selfies – until nearly a year after the ICO, in which the foundation accepted bitcoin and ether."

Token allocation

  • In return, 607,489,040 XTZ allocated for ICO participants were created at genesis. On top of the initial genesis supply, an additional ~76.3 million XTZ will be created for the Tezos Foundation and DLS (Dynamic Ledger Solutions). The XTZ that will be created and allocated to the Foundation and DLS is subject to a 4-year vesting schedule with monthly cliffs. This will create an aggregate allocated supply of 763,306,929 XTZ.
  • Development team: $317,000 worth of XTZ in addition to their regular compensation
  • Advisors: $75,000 worth of XTZ
  • PR consulting firm: $30,000 worth of XTZ

Utility

Token Details

  • From a commissioned Messari report (23-4-2023):

"42 million XTZ are minted annually As a result, the annual inflation rate becomes a smaller percentage of the circulating supply with each passing year. Additionally, Tezos has implemented multiple burn mechanisms. These include creating a new account or smart contract, allocating additional smart contract storage, and slashing for validator missteps. Despite these burn mechanisms, the burn rate is minimal, with less than 1% of tokens burned annually. In Q1 2023, the circulating supply of XTZ increased 1.1% QoQ and 4.4% annually."

  • From their 2020 year end blog (12-12-2020):

"TQ Tezos introduced a new token standard, FA2, to support a wide range of token types and multi-asset contracts."

Coin Distribution

"Tezos’ validator distribution by stake shows 448 million XTZ, or 64% of the total XTZ staked, are delegated to the top 20 validators (5% of the validator set). These include exchange entities operating validators like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, and the Tezos Foundation operating seven validators. The remaining 247 million XTZ, or 36% of the total XTZ staked, is delegated across 386 validators."

"The meteoric rise of custodial staking which started with Coinbase's Staking announcement in November 2019, almost 10 months ago, has been slowing down since May. Quarter to quarter we still observe a linear increase of 10-15% across the three large players Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance. Today custodians control 25.5% (174M) of Tezos' consensus (683M, 79.3% staking ratio) and hold 20.5% of the total supply (851M)."

"The identity of 119 public bakers, 6 custodians, the 8 foundation bakers and a few more is known, the rest is private and their identity is undisclosed. The top 20 bakers control 68% of network consensus, the Tezos foundation alone controls 27.7%, all 119 public staking services combined only 32.5%."

Tech

  • From this blog (27-9-2017): "The Tezos position paper identifies and addresses some key issues associated with protocol forks as an innovation upgrade mechanism. Having predated both the Bitcoin and Ethereum hard forks, this paper was visionary for its time in identifying the difficulty of coordinating social consensus around proposals, the economic cost of network splits, and the vulnerability of core development teams as a source of centralized control."
  • Code can be viewed [insert here].
  • Programming language used: The developers made a unique choice to use OCaml as the programming language arguing that it offers better security features and is a more powerful interface compared to other options like C++. OCaml also allows developers to check operations using formal verification which can detect potential bugs or errors in the code.
  • From a commissioned Messari report (21-7-2022):

"Tezos smart-contracts execute on a virtual machine called Michelson. The virtual machine is relatively high level, functional, and statically typed which helps analyze and audit contracts. Application developers typically use one of several smart-contract languages like SmartPy, JSLIGO, Archetype, and others."

  • From this blog (27-9-2017):

"Tezos plans to greatly improve security with Michelson, a new smart contracting language designed specifically to facilitate formal verification of on-chain code. Unlike Solidity, Michelson is not compiled to anything; it is a low level, stack-based, Turing-complete programming language that is directly interpreted by the Tezos virtual machine. So technically it is more analagous to EVM bytecode than Solidity, however it includes high-level constructs such as maps, sets, lambdas, cryptographic primitives, and contract-specific operations to make it easier for humans to read and write. It is purely functional, strongly typed, and statically type-checked to simplify the construction of correctness proofs and eliminate several types of vulnerabilities that have afflicted Solidity contracts. Currently there are at most only a handful of expert Michelson programmers, and being a new, stack-based language without many of the features programmers are used to, the learning curve may present an adoption hurdle for developers. However, Michelson provides a foundation upon which a higher level, more developer-friendly functional language that facilitates “full stack” formal verification could be developed. There is currently active research and development on the Liquidity programming language, which provides an OCaml-like syntax and transpiles to and from Michelson."

Transaction Details

How it works

"It’s an independent peer-to-peer (P2P) network, running in parallel with Tezos’ Layer 1, where data can be submitted and retrieved. Bakers continuously monitor the DAL and attest on Layer 1 whether a given piece of data is available on the DAL.

Unlike the P2P protocol employed by Layer 1, where each node receives all data, the P2P protocol utilized by the DAL is designed such that DAL nodes receive only part of the data. Each data “chunk” is accompanied by an erasure code, which makes it possible to reconstruct the original data, even if parts of the data are lost or never properly published.

In addition to attestations by bakers, DAL nodes perform data availability sampling, a technique that ensures, with a high probability, that the data is available while only downloading a small portion of the entire data. This means that anyone can ascertain data availability merely by running a node, without needing to trust bakers.

Overall, this approach is similar to what is proposed for Ethereum under the name ‘danksharding’, and what is planned for Celestia. An early version of the DAL is now available on the Mondaynet testnet. Concurrently, we are preparing the DAL for production, including stress testing its P2P protocol.

The current DAL version does not have data-availability sampling implemented, and participation is optional for testnet bakers. We expect both to change before Mainnet release, which is estimated for early 2024."

"At the core of this codebase is a system to formalize proposing, voting for, and implementing changes to the functionality of the network. Once a proposal has been made holders of Tezos (XTZ) tokens are able to vote with a weighting of one vote per token. Consensus is determined using a version of a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system where stakers, called bakers within the network, can lock up their tokens in exchange for the ability to validate blocks. In Tezo's more liquid DPoS system users are able to "delegate" tokens to bakers without transferring ownership. Rewards for validating blocks are distributed to bakers in the form of new XTZ tokens with a proportional amount of the reward distributed to wallets that have delegated tokens to the baker. This enables smaller token holders to participate in the validation (and reward) process if they hold less than the required amount to become a full baker. Using this model the team believes they can increase participation from token holders by reducing frictions and allowing anyone to receive newly released XTZ to maintain the relative value of their holdings.

To allow for future changes to the network Tezos is divided into network, transaction, and consensus protocols. The transaction and consensus protocols operate separately and plug into a generic network shell. This shell maintains the current state of the blockchain and allows the network to conduct internal checks on the protocols allowing them to validate their own replacements. Proposed changes can be made by anyone and are decided on by a vote from token holders. Proposals can include a payment to be made by the developer proposing a change which the team believes will incentive more impactful development on the platform."

Fees

Upgrades

  • The Tezos upgrade proposal, Athens, has successfully been implemented on the Tezos Protocol autonomously. "The implementation has proven that Tezos can upgrade to new protocol changes in an automated, decentralized, and self-funded manner. Nomadic Labs proposal attached a 100 XTZ invoice which the protocol automatically minted and distributed after successfully implementing the protocol change. This exercise enables any developer to submit a proposal with their own invoice attached to the proposal."
  • TzStats has launched (10-2019) a Tezos Babylon testnet, Babylon is the current tezos upgrade proposal. Update: the update after Babylon has been approved, called Cartgagenet and testnet has started (13-12-2019).
  • From Our Network #15 (3-4-2020):

"With world-wide spotlight elsewhere, the Tezos community quietly focused on hardening its base layer with a third protocol upgrade (codename Carthage) that went live on March 5. Voted for by 46% of all bakers and backed by 72% of network stake the participation rate was slightly down from earlier votes (46%/84% in Athens, 45%/83% in Babylon). Like expected for a bugfix release the on-chain upgrade went much smoother this time. >85% of all bakers had upgraded their software ahead of time and baker churn was limited to <3% (down from 10% in earlier upgrades)."

  • From the Foundation's blog (11-9-2020):

"Last week, Nomadic Labs, Metastate, and Gabriel Alfour announced that they were jointly releasing a new Tezos protocol proposal, Delphi, which was injected on September 3rd. Delphi is intended to improve the performance of the Michelson interpreter and gas model. Delphi is the latest proposed upgrade to Tezos, following Athens, Babylon, and Carthage, and is currently in the Exploration Vote period."

"The ninth and tenth protocol upgrades, Ithaca and Jakarta, were deployed."

Delphi

"Delphi is expected to improve gas cost by 4-10x. The theoretical gain factors we can expect from Delphi are approximately:

  1. 60x for writing contract data
  2. 40x for reading contract data
  3. 40x for parsing (aka. type checking)
  4. 4x for pure computation in the interpreter
  5. 2.5x for arithmetic
  6. 4.5x for recursion
  7. 5.5x for non-recursive calls

Practical gains greatly depend on the source of gas consumption and so it may vary a lot from a contract to another. Tezos Domains contracts, for example, will save 72% gas when running on Delphi."

Edo

"Tezos developers have revealed the next upgrade proposal dubbed "Edo." The implementation of Zcash's library Sapling will allow "shielding" transactions on Tezos. Another new feature is a ticket system that allows smart contracts to grant portable permissions or issue tokens."

  • Went live (13-2-2021):

"Some of the key features of Edo 2.0 are:

  1. Sapling: makes privacy-preserving transactions possible on Tezos;
  2. Tickets: provide a way for smart-contracts to authenticate data in relation to a Tezos address and in turn enable developers to write more secure and composable contracts;
  3. An extended Voting procedure with an added “Adoption” period: serves as a buffer time between the last block when the voting ends and the next block when the upgrade is executed on-chain (~ two weeks). It aims to ensure a smoother protocol upgrades.

The full list of new features can be found here."

Grenada

  • The seventh upgrade on Tezos and the third this year, Granada, has successfully reduced gas consumption and decreased block times (19-8-2021).

Staking

  • In Tezos, blocks are created through a process known as ‘baking.’ Each block is produced (“baked”) by a random stakeholder and notarized (“endorsed”) by 32 other random stakeholders. This is essentially the same as staking,  but it’s only open to network nodes with more than 10,000 XTZ. For each block created, a delegate can earn a 16 XTZ reward – roughly $15.5 at current prices.
  • Tezos users with smaller holdings can still participate by nominating a delegate to bake on their behalf. The delegate does not own or control the tokens in any way. In particular, it cannot spend them. However, if and when one of these tokens is randomly selected to bake a block, that right will belong to the delegate. A proposed protocol upgrade suggests decreasing the minimum from 10,0000 to stake to 8,000 XTZ, allowing more XTZ holders to bake independently. This update is expected to go live sometime in late May. (April 10, 2019)
  • Tezos is now (10-4-2019) one of the most-staked digital assets, with users currently baking $495M worth of XTZ tokens, or 75% of the circulating supply. Some of the delegated bakers close shop but continue collecting rewards (17-12-2019); "at present a huge amount of tez are delegated to closed and dead bakers."
  • Update (30-1-2020) from Our Network on staking:

"Custodial staking continued to gain traction in Tezos. Throughout January 2020 staked balances at exchanges increased by +1.3% (26M) to 14% (89M) of all staked coins. Staking participation overall increased by +18M to a new ATH of 77.3% (635M). At the same time staking yield dropped to an all-time-low of 1.48% above inflation. Despite diminishing yield the number of consensus participants (bakers) remains relatively stable at around 430. We show unique roll owners here because Tezos assigns validation & voting rights based on rolls with one roll equal to 8000 tez. About 50% (207) of all validators are self-baking entities, meaning they have <= 1 incoming delegation. 160 of them own less than 100k tez in staking balance, 10 self-bakers are whales with balances between 1-5M tez.

Although the amount of unique validators is high (430) the distribution of their weight tells a slightly different story. 50+% of Tezos staking is controlled by only 9 different entities while the top 100 bakers control 92% of the network. The largest entity (the Tezos Foundation) validates 27% of all blocks, the next largest are Coinbase (5.84%), Polychain (4.42%) and Cryptium Labs (3.62%), Binance (3.16%), Kraken (1.96%), P2P Validator (1.93%), Airfoil (1.72%) and FlippinTacos (1.71%). This is not troubling for consensus since rights are assigned randomly, but it plays a relevant role in governance. The foundation and some of the large bakers have historically abstained from voting. With the rise of custodial staking exchanges suddenly find themselves under pressure by the community to vote and build tools to let their delegators contribute."

"Custodial staking on centralized exchanges continues to grow massively. Now, at the end of Feb 2020, 126.8M tez (19.4% of all staked coins, 15% of total supply) are held by custodians, up +27% (30.6M) from January. Network-wide staking is still on the rise with +3.2% (20M) to reach a new ATH of 79.14% (655M). In perspective, only 2.9M new tez were minted last month. Staking rewards are at 6.48% annually, yield above inflation dropped to 1.44%.

Growth of custodial staking services is impressive. With 8.4% of the network stake, Coinbase has become the largest staking provider in Tezos within the past 4 months, directly followed by Kraken with 4.2%. Only the Tezos Foundation manages more stake (26.7%). Smaller custodians are on decline, although Chinese exchanges OKEx and Huobi grow as well. Zero-fee staking at Binance shows impact on traditional bakers who either shut down like Airfoil or begin offering zero-fee promotions. However, custodial growth is slowing down. After all there are only 128M (15%) more tez unstaked, about the same amount that has been moved on-chain this month."

  • From Our Network 2-10-2020):

"Out of a total of the 74k delegators, 71k delegate to active bakers, about 3k to inactive bakers. 75% (55.2k) of all delegators hold more than 1 XTZ (below, we focus on this group only). Only 1% (700) are related to custodial staking. The majority of 72.3% (39.4k) public delegator accounts are loyal accumulators who re-invest payouts or top-up their balances. Only 27.7% (15k) opportunistically move or sell their stake. The meteoric rise of custodial staking which started with Coinbase's Staking announcement in November 2019, almost 10 months ago, has been slowing down since May. Quarter to quarter we still observe a linear increase of 10-15% across the three large players Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance. Today custodians control 25.5% (174M) of Tezos' consensus (683M, 79.3% staking ratio) and hold 20.5% of the total supply (851M)."

"Validators on Tezos are called bakers and require a minimum of 6,000 XTZ ($8,800) to participate in Tezos’ consensus. Validators are allocated block publishing rights based on their total stake and are required to post roughly 8.25% of their XTZ delegations. Tezos uses inflationary block rewards, approximately 4.8% annually, as well as transaction fees to incentivize validators and delegators to participate in consensus."

Validator Stats

"Coinbase is currently the largest validator, holding a 14% share, followed by Everstake (6%) and Binance (5%). The top 20 validators on Tezos account for 64% of the total stake. Additionally, Tezos' validator set is globally diverse, with validators spread out across different regions."

"With over 400 bakers validating the Tezos Network, Tezos is a little low on validator numbers. These nodes appear to be well geographically decentralised. This is understandable as the requirements for being a baker are fairly accessible, with a small hardware cost and just 6000XTZ required."

"Tezos closed the quarter with 406 active validators. Over the 24 hour period of Jun. 30, 2022, new blocks were signed and published in 36 different countries. The United States registered the most validators with 37, followed by Switzerland (19), France (7), Canada (7), the Netherlands (7), and the United Kingdom (6)."

Scaling

"Validity rollups (ZK-rollups), arrived on the testnet. And Smart Rollups went live on mainnet.

Smart Rollups play a crucial role in Tezos' scaling plan and are essential to achieving the target of 1 million transactions per second. However, Smart Rollups offer more than just scaling. They provide a new method of developing decentralized applications on Tezos, using any language that compiles to WASM, including Rust, C/C++, Go, and Python."

  • From a Tezos blog on how their Enshrined Smart Rollups would work:

"Tezos’ Smart Optimistic Rollups will be an implementation of Optimistic rollups, which will allow for much more complex smart contracts, VMs, and other features to run on them compared to ZK rollups which in their current form are still limited to more basic transactions and require higher hardware requirements. Note, this might change as ZK rollups matures and are further developed.

In Tezos, anyone will be able to originate a rollup or deploy a rollup node so long as they have a minimum requirement of 10k tez. The 10k tez that are needed are used as a security deposit to prevent anything malicious.

Once a rollup is originated, it has its own address on the mainnet (starting with sr1) and anyone can deploy a roll up node to keep the rollup progressing. There are 4 different rollup node ‘modes’ that you can deploy but here we will only focus on the “operator” and the “accuser” modes which are the most important.

The operator rollup node is responsible for following the Layer 1 chain, updating the state, accepting transactions, batching them, regularly posting the commitments to Layer 1, and taking part in possible refutation games. This is basically a full-fledged node which keeps the rollup progressing.

On the other hand, the accuser rollup node is the node that keeps the rollup “in check” by following the Layer 1 chain and computing the same commitments that the operator node posts. The difference is that the accuser node doesn’t publish the commitments unless there is a conflict between its computations and those of the operator node.

Inthat case the accuser node publishes its own commitment and a refutation game begins between the two nodes where after pinpointing the conflict in the commitments, they each provide their proof and then the Layer 1 decides who is right and who is wrong. For these kind of decisions, a proof-generating Virtual machine (PVM) is added to the Tezos protocol (more on that later).

The rollup node that has posted the incorrect data will have its security deposit slashed and the honest node is rewarded with half the node’s security deposit that was slashed (the other half is burnt). In these refutation games, honest nodes are guaranteed to win so honest participants shouldn’t be worried about them.

The state of the Tezos rollups will take two weeks to be ‘finalized’ on the Layer 1 chain so there is enough time for “accuser nodes” to check the commitments of the rollup nodes."

"Tezos core developers announced scaling plans through enshrined optimistic rollups."

Other Details 

Smart Contracts

"Adoption: Smart contract usage on Tezos mainnet has not picked up speed yet. Throughout January mainnet has seen a meager 55 new contracts and 3.5k contract calls, the most prominent deployed contract has been StakerDAO. The real action in Tezos still happens on various testnets hinting at a quickly growing developer base. The most active one is Babylonnet which has seen an all-time high in deployed contracts 4,647 (+1,456 from Jan 1st) and an unprecedented growth in smart contract calls (+62k since Jan 1st which is a 2.6x growth in one single month)."

"Adoption: Testnets still outshine the smart contract situation on Tezos Mainnet. Calls on Mainnet have almost doubled compared to January (+7,587), the Atomex DEX saw some limited traffic (33 swaps) and early experiments with FA1.2 tokens have started. Babylonnet remains the most active network with a new record of +3,516 contracts and +74k calls this month, but note that these are all test contracts, often deployed and called by automated CI systems. The diversity of unique contract types (identified by their call interfaces) grew by +157 to 530 in total. 8 out of the top 10 contract types are generic programming examples. The most prominent contract people work on is DS Token (used by Securitize and Elevated Returns) with 111 total deployments and 6,652 calls in Feburary."

"Check out the new website from Edukera and learn how Archetype helps to develop smarter Smart Contracts on Tezos. Archetype is a domain-specific language to develop Smart Contracts on the Tezos blockchain, with a specific focus on contract security."

  • From their September update (1-9-2020): "Just yesterday, the 20,000th smart contract was created on Carthagenet."

Oracle Method

  • Has integrated Chainlink (30-4-2020). Update (12-12-2020): "SmartPy and Cryptonomic’s ongoing efforts to integrate Chainlink oracles" which hints towards it still not being done.
  • Has Harbinger integrated (26-8-2020).
  • Has a price oracle from Kaiko (8-2020).
  • From their monthly update (21-3-2021):

"Wolfram Blockchain have developed a new oracle for Tezos. The same month, TezID was released, which is an identity oracle for Tezos seen by its creators as a supplement to DIDKit by Spruce Systems."

Privacy Method

"Bolt Labs extends zkChannels protocol to enable privacy-preserving state channels on top of Tezos. We are thrilled to bring this technology to the Tezos community, and are currently collaborating with the teams at Nomadic Labs and Metastate to deploy zkChannels on Tezos via an amendment proposal in the next year. We are also interested in building a cross-chain bridge via zkChannels for connecting Zcash or Bitcoin to Tezos, and provides censorship-resistance to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications."

Compliance

  • Has a partnership with a chain analysis company 'to be AML compliant' (12-6-2020).

Their Other Projects

DEX

"As first decentralized exchange Atomex has been operating for more than a year and Dexter joined as second yesterday. While Atomex supports cross-chain (HTLC) swaps with a professional market maker, Dexter is an automated market maker similar to Uniswap for tokens hosted on Tezos."

FA2

  • From this blog by TQ Tezos:

"FA2 is a multi-asset interface on the Tezos blockchain, enabling users to create a wide range of token types, such as fungible, non-fungible, or semi-fungible. FA2 provides a standard API to transfer tokens, check balances, administer permissions to other on-chain contracts, and manage metadata."

NFT

"Tezos (XTZ) co-founder Kathleen Breitman is preparing to launch the alpha version of a crypto-powered collectible card game called ‘Emergents.’" However, she has hinted (6-4-2020) that she will NOT launch it on Tezos.

Osiris

  • Osiris harnesses Tezos Smart Contract Optimistic Rollup technology building EVM kernel, enabling the creation of an EVM rollup (6-6-2023).

Roadmap

Privacy

  • From an AMA with the Core Dev's (13-2-2020):

"There is no immediate plan for now to have a generic zk proving scheme in Tezos, although we’d like to have one in the future. We do plan to propose privacy-preserving transactions in 007, which are implemented using the Sapling protocol from ZCash and in particular the library developed by the ECC. Sapling does use zk-snarks internally, but they are very specific to privacy preserving transactions. More info"

Layer 2

  • From an AMA with the Core Dev's (13-2-2020):

Sophia Gold said:

"Layer two is one of the major focuses of LabNet. Currently there are plans to implement both optimistic and zk rollup."

Adrian Brinks however said:

"Personally I am not yet convinced by most of the layer 2 solutions. Ethereum and Bitcoin have tried for years and spend millions of dollars on it but none of these platforms have yet seen any widely used layer 2 solutions.

Layer 2 in Bitcoin and Ethereum came about because they couldn’t evolve the baselayer fast enough (or at all) and hence had to invent this layer 2 thing. However in Tezos we have the advantage that we can evolve the base layer and due to that our team will spend a lot of time focusing on making the base layer scalable."

Finality

  • From an AMA with the Core Dev's (13-2-2020):

"Is Tendermint or “Tenderbake” currently the only finality solution core developers are currently exploring? Are there other projects being considered? Or is there a solution that you would like to see explored as a potential proposal?"

Got answered with:

"Another promising area into which Cryptium Labs may start looking in the future is to add a finality gadget. That way we could leave Emmy+ as it is and finalise blocks that are being produced by it. The advantage of this approach is that it enables to have fast finality in good network conditions, but in case >1/3 of the validators get nuked we can use Emmy+ to recover without hard-forking out the offline validators by doing an unsafe reset. The approach is somewhat similar to what Polkadot is using. Once we have finality gadgets we need to spend a bunch of time building efficient mobile light clients in order to make wallets not have to trust the fullnodes."

And

"Hotstuff and PaLa also look promising due to their simplicity and the pipeline-ing feature. However, for the moment we feel it’s more important to find solutions that tolerate more than one third adversaries."

WASM

  • From an AMA with the Core Dev's (13-2-2020):

"I think adding WASM as an execution target for smart contracts is an interesting choice that probably makes sense. The rest of the industry is moving towards it.

Whether it is feasible (or desirable) to execute the entire economic protocol in WASM is yet to be seen. Most chains that take this approach, such as Polkadot, Near and Solana aren’t multi-language on the protocol level, but rather the economic protocol is written in one language and all future versions are also written in that language."

Revenue

  • Revenue fell from the 100-200k range to 22k. From a commissioned Messari report (25-7-2022):

"Tezos' revenue, measured by total gas fees spent (excluding storage costs), experienced a decrease of 82% QoQ in Q2. This decline was primarily influenced by a 79% decrease in the average transaction fee. The reduction in the average transaction fee was attributed to the decline of the XTZ price and a slowdown in NFT front-running bidding activities."

Usage

"Network usage increased year over year, with a 12% increase in smart contract calls and a 94% increase in transactions. Through H1 2022, developer activity, measured by new smart contract deployments, is up 288% versus the same period in 2021. NFT marketplaces are the top five applications on Tezos by unique users as Tezos continues to command a global NFT presence.

Although Tezos’ NFT marketplaces captures the bulk of the attention, Tezos also has a developed DeFi ecosystem. Youves, a synthetic asset protocol, has the most TVL with $14 million, followed by the decentralized exchange (DEX) Liquidity Baking ($13 million), the stablecoin protocol Kolibri ($7 million), the DEX QuipuSwap ($3 million), the DEX Plenty DeFi ($2 million), and DEXs Vortex and SpicySwap (roughly $400,000 each). Tezos closed Q2 2022 with $41 million in TVL, ranked approximately 50th in TVL according to Defi Llama."

  • From their blog (2-4-2021):

"Tezos shattered through its previous record of contract calls, capping off March with over 360K contracts calls and reaching 100K daily transactions. We can expect Tezos to cross over 1 million total contract calls in April with important product launches in DeFi."

"In the past six months we've seen continuing growth in the amount of mainnet contract calls. Additionally, we see very healthy activity that indicates continuing developers activity. On both testnets, we see an average of 700 contract deployments per day. The holiday season kind of lowered the average, because when I checked two weeks ago, we were at an average of 900 deployments a day."

"Tezos is slowly but steadily gaining traction. The majority of all publicly visible activity still happens on testnets (mostly on Carthagenet, but the recently launched Delphinet is warming up). It turns out that the more interesting use-cases are gas-constrained, so the network upgrade to Delphi is most welcome."

"Only 256 smart contracts were deployed on the mainnet from June 2018 to July 2020, but in August 2020 alone, 357 smart contracts were deployed! Contract Calls on the Tezos mainnet also reached new highs with 20,699 calls made in August alone, which is more than all other months combined. The total calls on the mainnet now stand at 36,530, with 4,741 made so far this month."

"Most of the activity on Tezos mainnet still originates from transactions on deprecated KT1 delegator contracts (mostly baker payouts sent from or to these accounts). Unsurprisingly, baker payouts contribute most to the network gas usage today. Since August, we're also seeing the first operating oracles on mainnet and just two days ago the first AMM DEX Dexter launched with two pools for tzBTC (wrapped Bitcoin) and USDtz (stablecoin) tokens. The first two days saw 1,800 transactions on both pools and right now there are 40k XTZ, 13k USDtz and 5.6 tzBTC locked."

  • From their September update (1-9-2020): "Just yesterday, the 20,000th smart contract was created on Carthagenet."

"Adoption: With nearing end of live for the Babylon testnet, dev teams are slowly migrating over to Carthagenet. Both testnets combined we see a continued growth in developer activity (+10% calls) and a strong increase in contract diversity (+34%). Clusters of activity on testnets appear to be around new token designs and STO product demos which is very encouraging."

  • From an AMA with the Core Dev's (13-2-2020):

"Overall it’s important to acknowledge that Tezos is a working system, but is still far away from being able to be used by a large group of users."

Projects building on Tezos

  • "Andra Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, has announced (22-1-2020) its own token: Silicon Valley Coin (SVC). The company plans to issue it via a security token offering (STO) in collaboration with Tezos Foundation and TokenSoft. SVC will be built on the Tezos blockchain and utilize TokenSoft’s issuance platform. The fund will use it to invest in late-stage technology companies."
  • Atomex; DEX
  • Biconomy; "Tezos will be one of the first Layer 1 chains they will be supporting with the relayer infrastructure which enables meta transactions." (10-9-2020).
  • BMW
  • BTG. Latin American bank BTG Pactual and asset manager Dalma Capital announced that they will be using the Tezos blockchain to launch security token offerings (STOs). The banks said the deal will be worth well over $1 billion when all existing and prospective token issuances are completed.
  • California DMV is doing a pilot, building consumer-facing applications, including digital wallets that hold car title NFTs (27-1-2023).
  • DAO Baker ecosystem (Including SWAP market, Yield baker and DAO Baker refils)
  • DealBox; "the first-ever tokenization of real estate in Mexico alongside MountX" (12-12-2020).
  • DEXter is a Uniswap-like DEX built on Tezos. (7-2019). Even though there are not many assets live on Tezos yet, the infrastructure is being built.
  • Forge's French CBDC (15-9-2020): "Tezos has been selected for the French central bank’s digital euro trials. The trials will focus on a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) for interbank settlements."
  • ERX; Tezos-based STO exchange by Elevated Returns.
  • Homebase; create DAOs. Building a testnet (18-2-2021)
  • Inveniam NAV Pricing solution
  • Juster; (price) prediction markets (11-2021)
  • Kalamint; Tezos-based NFT platform.
  • Kolibri; stablecoin project which is similar to MakerDAO's Sai (18-11-2020).
  • Logical Pictures; launched (12-12-2020) a €100 million tokenized fund built on Tezos to finance films in the country of France.
  • Lugh; "A France-based retail giant Groupe Casino will launch a Euro-pegged stablecoin called Lugh on the Tezos blockchain." (25-3-2021).
  • QuipoSwap. Madfish Solutions published (4-2-2020) an article about QuipuSwap, a decentralized token exchange on Tezos.
  • SEXP; Tezos-based Synthetic Exchange.
  • Sona is a proposed idea to develop a decentralized, self-sovereign identity deployed on the Tezos protocol. Sona will encompass identity verification, on-chain relationship management, private data storage and wallet management with a method to recover your identity if a private key is compromised or lost.
  • Spruce Systems; Tezos Identity (27-8-2020).
  • StakerDAO (launched on Tezos early January 2020)
  • TEZEX; their ETH bridge went live (18-2-2021)
  • TezFin
  • TzButton; "the social experiment on Tezos, has entered the second round with 102.8 tez in the pot." (12-12-2020).
  • The French city of Verneuil-sur-Seine is voting on a road planning project using the Tezos blockchain (5-10-2020).

Projects from ETH to Tezos

"Securitize and Elevated Returns have collaborated (15-9-2019) to transition Aspencoin— a security token representing property ownership— to the Tezos blockchain. Both parties claim that with high valued assets already in the pipeline, the collaboration will result in $1 billion worth of tokenized assets.

After a reported valuation of $18 million, Aspencoin recently switched to Securitize and their Digital Security (DS) Protocol. Securitize is a compliance platform for digital securities, which aims to ensure regulatory compliance for the life-cycle of digital assets. Now, Aspencoin is transitioning from Ethereum to the Tezos blockchain."

Assets / STO's

  • Assets on Tezos; A proposal for a standard interface for creating and managing fungible assets using smart-contracts on Tezos. The newly proposed asset interface standard is similar to ERC-20, with the upcoming reference implementation allowing developers to specify a third party manager of the asset contract (eg a STO, a DAO or multisig) as well as soon having formally verified properties.
  • "TQ Tezos, Nomadic Labs, and Serokell are jointly working on proposing a standard interface for creating and managing fungible assets using smart-contracts on Tezos. Serokell has already produced an example implementation. The initial interface follows ERC-20 closely, as the standard is well known and widely used by third parties (wallets, exchanges), and familiar to developers. Engineers at Nomadic Labs and Serokell are also developing alternatives inspired by other emerging standards, such as ERC-777 and ERC-1155."
  • Cryptonomic is making asset tokenization available presently (15-2-2020) on the Tezos chain. 
  • From their blog (27-2-2020): 

"Over $3B in STO’s are slated to take place on the Tezos protocol. Infrastructure around the STO landscape is being developed and security token issuance platforms such as TokenSoft will be utilized in an upcoming STO — Silicon Valley Coin.

  1. Elevated Returns and Securitize — Are seeking to conduct and deploy up to $1 billion worth of real-estate STO’s on the Tezos protocol. Expected launch of the first deal of $77M real-estate backed security tokens is slated for April.
  2. BTG Pactual and Dalma Capital — Are seeking to use the Tezos blockchain for conducting up to $1 billion worth of STO’s.
  3. tZERO and Alliance Investments — Have announced their plans to tokenize the first of their total $643 million worth of STO’s on Tezos with the River Plaza located in the UK.
  4. Fundament Group — Has announced a strategic partnership with the Tezos Foundation to develop digital securities infrastructure.
  5. Equisafe — Will develop the NyX Standard, “a set of smart contracts on Tezos blockhain, audited by institutions and open sourced on an MIT license”. Launch of the NyX Standard is slated for this year.
  6. Vertalo — A security token management and issuance platform has transitioned from Ethereum to Tezos.
  7. Andra Capital and TokenSoft — Utilizing TokenSoft’s security token issuance platform, Andra Capital is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in it’s Silicon Valley Coin STO which represents interest in the Andra Capital Open-Ended Fund. The fund is currently valued at $500 million."

"The Bitcoin Association Switzerland (BSA) announced a group of crypto firms has collectively launched a tokenized version of Bitcoin, tzBTC, on the Tezos blockchain. Similar to Wrapped BTC (WBTC) on Ethereum, each tzBTC is backed by an equivalent amount of Bitcoin. But unlike the process of creating WBTC, which relies solely on crypto custodian BitGo, four different companies (called Keyholders) have the ability to mint and burn tzBTC to maintain the 1:1 peg. The BSA serves as a third-party mediator to uphold the integrity of these four Keyholders, creating a more robust, albeit still trusted, checks-and-balances system."

 Competition

"Many existing Ethereum rollups necessitate a high level of trust in the teams that deploy and maintain these rollups. Admin keys can play a vital role in managing and upgrading smart contracts on these rollups. This creates a centralization risk, as these teams can unilaterally make decisions and adjustments.

Conversely, Tezos’ rollups, like Osiris, emphasize decentralization. Any participant can become a staker on an Osiris node, contributing to the rollup’s decentralization. Furthermore, anyone can serve as a refutor, challenging any Osiris node that posts a false commitment to Layer 1."

"Tezos operates on a delegated proof-of-stake consensus, which it calls “liquid proof-of-stake.” However, researchers have found that Tezos, while not achieving the same level of decentralization as Ethereum, is more decentralized than many DPoS blockchains. Most likely, this is because Tezos doesn’t impose any upper limit on the number of nodes. Tezos and Ethereum 2.0 can, therefore, certainly compete on security and throughput. The main difference between the two is, perhaps, Tezos’ on-chain governance model.

When the Breitmans conceived of the platform, their vision was for it to be self-maintaining. Similar to what is ultimately planned for Cardano, anyone who meets the minimum staking requirements can vote on protocol upgrades that are then directly implemented once voted through. In contrast, Ethereum governance has always been an off-chain effort and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So far, it would be fair to say that neither model has proven itself inherently superior to the other."

TzLibre & nTezos forks (2018)

"The delay between the the ICO and the platform’s launch is largely due to a conflict that pitted Tezos’ founders, Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, against Johann Gevers, former president of the Tezos Foundation. While the Breitmans controlled the code through DLS, Gevers controlled the funds.

The standoff ended when Gevers stepped down in February, but the platform still did not launch immediately. The foundation’s decision to conduct KYC/AML checks may indicate that legal and regulatory uncertainties stood in the way. The Breitmans, Dynamic Ledger Solutions, the Tezos Foundation and others associated with the project have been sued at least four times between them.

Investors have aired their grievances on a technical as well as a legal front. At least two groups of developers have announced plans to create alternate versions of Tezos and to dispense with aspects of the platform they don’t like, such as KYC and awards of pre-mined tokens to the foundation.

TzLibre announced the day after Gevers stepped down that it would launch its own version of the Tezos protocol. Another project, nTezos, emerged in response to the Tezos Foundation’s KYC announcement. Both alternate Tezos implementations’ teams are pseudonymous."

Dune Fork (2019)

"French engineering group, OcamlPro, is pursuing a Tezos fork after the token's managing foundation threatened to stop funding them over governance concerns, according to a blog post by the Tezos Commons Foundation. OcamlPro's leadership is said to have partnered with a newly registered crypto fund, Starchain Capital, in order to fork Tezos and to create a new blockchain called Dune Protocol. According to a leaked email allegedly sent by Starchain Capital, it is currently creating an SPV to raise $1m for 5% of the total token supply to fund the operations. The fork is scheduled for September 2019.

OCamlPro had been receiving funding from the Tezos Foundation as part of their grant program, working on Tezos-related projects such as Liquidity and its block explorer, TzScan. However, tensions began to arise after it emerged OCamlPro was not fully open-sourcing its software, which is one of the conditions for financing grantees. The Tezos Foundation made it known that the funding, which expired in Q2 of this year, would be halted unless this criteria was met.

The Tezos protocol has been lauded as a solution to solve proposal disputes through its on-chain governance mechanism. However its software is open source, meaning anyone can fork from it."

"During this period numerous debates arose in the Tezos Community surrounding TzScan and Liquidity’s licensing agreement. OCamlPro leadership started publicly accusing the Tezos Foundation of ‘blacklisting’ them from their grant program.

They appear to have purposefully stirred the community over the fear of Liquidity to be a paid licensed product, and not free or open source. The reasoning given was they had not received further grants to support their development. They received grants in the past, and were in at that time in negotiation regarding future grants with the Tezos Foundation, but the reasoning as to why they had not been approved remained a mystery to the broader community. A segment of the community sided with OCamlPro without knowing the full context.

This sparked a large debate on whether or not all Tezos grantees should be making their software open source because many features of TzScan also were not, and eventually fizzled out for the most part as they decided to change their Liquidity license to a free one, even if still not MIT."

"The main Tezos engineers who were originally at OCamlPro are now working at Nomadic Labs, not OCamlPro." The post also mentioned: "They did not create OCaml."

  • The post also goes on claiming OcalmPro and Starchain are forking for money:

"This alleged email evidence, read in full here, suggests that Dune protocol is not a principled hard fork. Starchain Capital describes a liquidation event planned for later this year. What is described as an opportunity is set up to provide a quick turnaround for investors and OCamlPro leadership.

Projection:
Low: day1, the fork captures 5% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$50m valuation
(liquidity event)
Middle: day1, the fork captures 20% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$200m
valuation (liquidity event)
Good: day1, the fork captures 40% of the current Tezos market cap, which lead us to a +$400m
valuation (liquidity event)"

Foundation's reaction on the Dune fork

  • On 17-6-2019 Tezos Commons announced: "Tezos Foundation to give away ledger Nano S wallets to all fundraiser contributors for the celebration of 1 year launch"

"This announcement was sent on Jun 17th via email to 30K contributors, the very same day someone posted on Reddit the bombshell unofficial announcement of Dune. Tezos Stiftung is trying to distract contributors from this news, which is a perfect example of their total failure as managers."

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Is known for its good on-chain governance structure.
  • Has low fees and has been committed to keeping it that way.
  • Has been pro-active in getting partnerships in France.

Cons

Issues

  • The Tezos name was once synonymous with drama. A boardroom dispute, protracted ICO token lock-up and regulatory issues meant that when the mainnet finally launched last summer (9-2018), most investors dumped their holdings on the open market. Prices more than halved from $4 to $ 1.60.
  • As this tweet summed it up:
  1. Foundation struggles
  2. Failed Dune fork
  3. Spam attacks
  4. Class-action lawsuit
  5. Failed TzLibre fork

But still standing (7-2019).

  • Evan Van Ness said "It's pretty clear that building on Tezos is currently a disaster." (3-10-2020) after reading an audit report done by Trail of Bits on a project building on Tezos. However, Evan is a prominent Ethereum supporter, so this should be taking with a grain of salt.
  • From this blog (27-9-2017):

"In contrast to Ethereum’s decentralization-favoring PoS design, Tezos deliberately trades off centralization for increased throughput. Tezos CTO Arthur Breitman believes that the desire for dirt cheap validation stems “more from a misplaced egalitarian ideology than from actual economic or security arguments” and expects the Tezos users to ultimately find the right balance to maximize adoption. On the other hand, Casper researcher Vlad Zamfir opines that Tezos is embracing plutocracy and (by presuming an honest majority) ignoring the interesting incentive alignment and mechanism design questions."

Tezos settling it's lawsuits

""The Tezos Foundation chose to settle all claims because the Tezos Foundation believes it is in the best interest of the Tezos project and community as a whole. The Foundation continues to believe the lawsuits were meritless and continues to deny any wrongdoing. However, lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming, and it was decided that the one-time financial cost of a settlement was preferable to the distractions and legal costs associated with continuing to fight in the courts," the foundation stated in the announcement.

In July 2018, Tezos shocked the market by conducting one of the largest ICOs in history. However, the project was soon hit by two lawsuits claiming that the ICO was an illegal and unregistered securities offering. The two lawsuits were then consolidated in 2018. In response, Tezos has argued that it was not a securities offering but a fundraising event instead, where tokens were given backs as a gift in exchange for people’s donations to the project.

The settlement is still pending court approval."

  • From this blog (3-9-2020):

"On August 27, 2020 the Honorable Judge Seeborg approved the Final Settlement Order for the Tezos class-action lawsuit. It has been a long tumultuous journey, almost 3 years worth of litigation (by unscrupulous/unsavory people that needlessly slowed the project and caused irreparable harm), and on, August, 27, 2020, the litigation has come to an end. Many people have been waiting for this day. No more legal clouds hanging over the project. The project moves on. Sign, sealed, and delivered."

Tezos Protocol Team, investors, etc.

  • There are two legal entities behind the project: Dynamic Ledger Solutions, Inc. (DLS) and the Tezos Foundation (the Foundation) located in Zug. DLS is a US-based company currently controlled by its founders Kathleen and Arthur Breitman. It owns all of the Tezos-related intellectual property (IP), including the source code of the Tezos ledger, logos, trademark applications and domain names, as well as relationships with several contractors and a potential customer-base. The Foundation is a Swiss foundation founded in Zug in May, 2017. As a legal entity, it operates independently from DLS, though DLS advises the Foundation closely on technology.
  • The DLS team working on Tezos’ includes 11 people, 10 of them are core developers. The team is headed by Arthur Breitman and Kathleen Breitman who are the two shareholders of DLS (not confirmed by the team at the moment of publication). Update (8-4-2020): Both the Breitman's are getting less and less involved with the project. Seemingly because of issues instead of decentralisation.
  • Breitman, Arthur; (LinkedIn, Github) graduated from the New York University with a degree in financial mathematics. His latest professional activities before Tezos were related to strategy development and market making, including posts of Vice President at Morgan Stanley, Associate at Goldman Sachs, and Portfolio Manager at White Bay Group. UPDATE (4-4-2020): “Arthur Breitman’s recent exclusion from the Tezos Techincal Advisory Committee. It has yet to be confirmed, but he stated that he “bowed out from [his] already minimal activities after receiving veiled threats.“”
  • Breitman, Kathleen; also the New York University graduate, also worked for several large companies. She worked among other as Strategy Associate at R3 CEV that leads a consortium of about 80 financial institutions who explore the application of blockchain in global financial services, at the consulting company Accenture, and as Management Associate at the investment firm Bridgewater Associates.
  • Jacob Arluck; from TQ Group
  • 'Martin'
  • The developers are primarily located in Paris (Nomadic Labs), France, and has been working through a partnership with OCamlPro (website, Github), a software company founded by Fabrice Le Fessant (one of the team members).

Advisors

Stakers / Bakers

  • From (3-12-2019) this The Block article: "With one decision to give its retail customers access to its staking service, Coinbase became the second-largest validator on Tezos virtually overnight"
  • Binance is (3-12-2019) the 6th largest validator on Tezos, excluding Foundation Bakers.
  • Stake.fish is a staker.
  • Figment is a staker. "Baking since 2018. Multiple grant recipient from the Tezos Foundation. We are building Baker Hub, a post-delegation tool for staking participants to track their baker’s performance with alerts." (9-3-2020)

Funding

  • Early backers

- Ten entities: three hedge funds with a focus on tokens and seven high net-worth individuals, or federations thereof

- Backed the DLS team from September 2016 through March 2017

- Total early funding from them amounted to $612,000

  • Part of portofolio (as of 8-2019) at: Winklevoss Capital Management, Draper Associates, Meltem Demirors
  • Latin American bank BTG Pactual and asset manager Dalma Capital announced that they will be using the Tezos blockchain to launch security token offerings (STOs). The banks said the deal will be worth well over $1 billion when all existing and prospective token issuances are completed.
  • Tim Draper; publicly backed the fundraiser in 2017. From a Tezos blog (16-4-2021): "His investment arm Draper Goren Holm has invested in several Tezos projects, and most recently received an investment from the Tezos Foundation to fund blockchain startups building on Tezos. Draper University & Tezos Israel partnered together to launch a blockchain pre-acceleration program to connect Silicon Valley experts and investors to innovative entrepreneurs building their projects on blockchain."

Partners

  • Google Cloud has announced (23-2-2023) a partnership with blockchain company Tezos to become a block validator (“baker”) in its network. As part of this partnership, Google Cloud will also offer Tezos validation services through its platform.
  • From their 2020 year end blog (12-12-2020):

"Tezos was selected as one of the first 6 public blockchains for China’s state-backed blockchain infrastructure network, BSN and as a technology partner by Microsoft India to incubate 100 startups for its “Century Program.”

Tezos Dev Groups

  • There are a bunch of different entities and groups who do Core Dev work on Tezos. The following were mentioned in an AMA (13-2-2020): Nomadic Labs, Cryptium, Dai Lambda, TQ Tezos and LIGO. 'Galfour', who split off from Nomadic Labs in 2019.
  • "Depending (13-2-2020) on the metric 20-40 are involved in the core protocol."

Dai Lambda

  • From the AMA of 13-2-2020:

"We DaiLambda are working on a new storage sub-system called Plebeia, version controlled append only file system using Merkle Patricia trees. Keeping Merkle hashes of tree nodes, it can provide Merkle proofs very quickly, we can use them to implement trustless wallets. We are currently testing a Tezos node with Plebeia and soon publish a blog/agora report about it. Since Plebeia’s Merkle hash is incompatible with the current Tezos context hash, if we want to fully use Plebeia in Tezos we need a protocol change for the context hash. It requires some more time, maybe in 008.

We also have a very little side project called SCaml, yet another high level language compiles to Michelson. It was born in our joint research with ReFX team of Kyoto university who studies a refinement type system for Michelson to produce sample smart contracts quickly. It is not very powerful language, but small and stable, and we love the name."

Cryptium Labs

  • From the AMA of 13-2-2020:

"At the moment we’re only working on the Tezos protocol as core developers. The other projects we’re working on, e.g. Juvix 1 or the Multi-Asset Shielded Pool (Zero Knowledge Proofs) are still in R&D phase. These projects’ timelines have the priority of benefiting the Tezos protocol (in the case of the MASP) or the Tezos ecosystem (in the case of Juvix). Back in 2018 we started Cryptium as a validator entity and only I was full time working on it. Cryptium (the R&D Team) working on Tezos Core and other R&D officially started in Q1 2019. Ever since the R&D Team started, our involvement with the network has been limited to operating the validator (as it was already fully setup) and participated in governance.

I understand why folks are confused, we’re working on changing the branding so the validator is differentiated from the R&D Team."

Galfour

  • From the AMA of 13-2-2020:

"I split off from Nomadic Labs a year ago.
When I want to contribute to Tezos, I mostly discuss the different things I am working with the different parties to reach consensus. I found this consensus reasonable and not that hard to reach multiple times.
I am pushing to move those discussions in the open, as right now, a big part of it is still quite informal and private (for lack of process/time than lack of will)."

Cryptonomic

Tezos Foundation

  • Aka "The Foundation"
  • Maintains the code and pays developers

Money related

  • The Tezos project is exceptionally(27-9-2017) well-funded, both from traditional venture capital and crowdfunding.
  • Tezos conducted an ICO from June 28, 2017 to July 13, 2017, in which 65,681 BTC and 361,122 ETH were raised. In return, 607,489,040 XTZ allocated for ICO participants were created at genesis. On top of the initial genesis supply, an additional ~76.3 million XTZ will be created for the Tezos Foundation and DLS (Dynamic Ledger Solutions). The XTZ that will be created and allocated to the Foundation and DLS is subject to a 4-year vesting schedule with monthly cliffs. This will create an aggregate allocated supply of 763,306,929 XTZ.
  • From this article (22-3-2020):

"Tezos grants $37 million to its developers from its $635 million that is owned in assets. This is much more than the $232 million that was raised in the infamous Tezos initial coin offering (ICO).

When asked about how the foundation was able to achieve this, the company’s CFO Roman Schnider talked and said that the project benefited from positive crypto market dynamics. He also said: “The increase is largely due to the appreciation of our blockchain assets over the last three years, BTC and XTZ in particular.”

Around $13 million were also awarded to local Tezos communities across the globe."

  • According to this podcast (6-2019) the Foundation has been very generous in giving funding to multiple foundations and labs around the world who built on upgrades and projects. TQ Group, Nomadic Labs (in Paris and which has upgraded protocols and is proposing other upgrades), a number foundations in Asia (With funding for the Tezos Korea, Tezos Japan and the Tezos South-East Asia) and a foundation in the USA (Tezos Commons Foundation). Cryptium Labs (a baker which has experience with work on the core protocol of Cosmos and is now also upgrading protocols on Tezos).
  • It announced funding for TezTech, a Tezos focused software shop with several projects underway, including a trustless scaling and custody solution, as well as APIs and software libraries.
  • The Tezos Foundation, has put 1 million XTZ, currently (8-2019) worth around $1.18M, into a cryptocurrency treasure hunt run by Satoshi’s Treasure; Satoshi's Treasure was also behind the competition for $1M of Bitcoin that started back in April 2019
  • Participated (5-3-2020) in a funding round of $2.5M for Zabo.
  • Has given (9-3-2020) Figment multiple grants.

Critiques

  • Critiques summed up in this (19-6-2019) reddit thread:

"lack of transparency: wages & perks per foundation member, pwc audit publication, where is it?, grants in terms of usd, which partnerships with corporations, Olaf out of the foundation, no communication...poor website, no marketing such YT channels, udemy classes...and so on. Well not sure the list is exhaustive, work in progress and obviously lack of liquidity which is big..."

Governance

"The Council will continue to serve in its primary function as a strategic and supervisory body. The basic mandated duties, as defined in the Foundation’s Notarial Deed, will be adhered to. Concurrently, an executive team that reports to the Council will be installed to implement the Foundation’s strategy and administer its day-to-day operations.

Consequently, the roles so far covered by the President of the Foundation will be subdivided into two different functions. An Executive Director, who is not a Council member, will lead the Foundation’s executive team and a Chair of the Foundation Council will lead the governance and supervision matters of the Foundation. The current President of the Tezos Foundation, Ryan Jesperson, has informed the Council that he will not seek re-election and will not be a member of the Council after April 30.

In addition to hiring an Executive Director, the Foundation Council will also designate two new Council members. It will seek to nominate to these roles accomplished individuals who possess sector-specific networks, strong professional track records, founder or C-level experience in mid-cap or large-cap companies or alternatively leadership experience in relevant renowned institutions, and expertise in key areas relevant to the Tezos ecosystem. A targeted search process has already been initiated for this purpose. Further information on the nomination process will be communicated in due time.

The transformation will begin in March 2020 and is expected to be completed by Q4/2020."

Audits

  • From one of their updates (6-3-2020):

"The Tezos Foundation is the only large-scale public blockchain foundation that has a “Big4” audit firm as its independent statutory auditor. The 2018 audit was recently completed and, as customary and mandated by Swiss law, the audit report has been filed with the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations. The audit took longer than planned due to the complexity and novelty of auditing cryptocurrency assets. The 2018 audit report is not a public document and the Foundation has committed to proactively publishing Biannual Updates to provide public accountability and transparency. The next Biannual Update is in its final stages and will be released soon. There will be a section in the update that speaks more about the nature of the completed 2018 audit and also the 2019 audit which is now underway."

Team, partnerships of The Tezos Foundation

  • Ryan Jesperson; ex president of the Foundation (as of 2-2018 but left 2-2020). He claimed he had finished what he 'came to do' which was "get the Foundation back on track and the second was to help, along with the rest of the Tezos community, to move the Tezos project forward."

"To ensure a smooth transition, the Foundation Council has formed a Nomination Committee which consists of Hubertus Thonhauser, Alexis Bonte, Ryan Lackey, and Ulrich Sauter. In coming weeks, the Committee will release additional information regarding the criteria and process that will be followed to select the next Foundation Chair. "

  • The previous president of the foundation, Johann Gevers, stepped down in February (2018), after a tenure in which many viewed him as stifling the launch of a protocol that set a record for the largest initial coin offering (ICO) of all time up that point – $232 million in July 2017. Since Jesperson took over, along with a completely new board, the foundation has partnered with major auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers; actively funded academics, community members and entrepreneurs with interest in contributing to the ecosystem and set up the first set of validation nodes on which to launch the network. The day after Gevers stepped down TzLibre was announced as an alternative.
  • Michel Mauny; "Michel is Chief Scientific Officer at Nomadic Labs, on leave from Inria (the French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics), where he was a senior researcher and more recently Chief Executive Officer of the Inria Foundation. Michel’s scientific interests are mainly in the fields of programming languages: design, implementation, semantics, static analysis, and type systems. After his Ph.D. at Paris-Diderot University, Michel joined Inria in 1985 and worked on programming languages with the research group that designed and developed OCaml, the functional programming language used to implement Tezos, and the Coq proof assistant. From 1989 to 2005, Michel led the research team that further developed OCaml."
  • Marylène Micheloud
  • Lars Haussmann
  • Hubertus Thonhauser
  • Roman Schnider; The co-creator of PricewaterhouseCooper (PWC) Switzerland’s blockchain initative is joining the Tezos Foundation as the newly appointed CFO and Head of Operations
  • As a legal entity, it operates independently from DLS, though DLS advises the Foundation closely on technology.
  • "Olaf"; but he is not in the foundation anymore.
  • MAMA, a member, according to their website (27-4-2021).

Tezos Commons Foundation

Basics

  • Tezos Commons Foundation (“TCF”)
  • Not to be confused with the Tezos Foundation
  • "The Tezos Commons Foundation is a U.S.-based non-profit corporation that will play an active role in the advancement of the Tezos project by sponsoring meetups, educational programs, and other initiatives focused on empowering the Tezos community.

Projects

  • "In collaboration with Zastrin, learn to build a simple voting application on Tezos. This program is sponsored by Tezos Commons and is open to the community at no cost. This 5 part program is self paced and requires no prior blockchain development experience."

Team

Investors

  • Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation

Tezos Stablecoin Foundation

"Tezos Stable Technologies, a subsidiary of the newly launched Tezos Stablecoin Foundation charged with advancing DeFi development on the Tezos blockchain, closed a successful seed round today, venture capital firm Draper Goren Holm announced. The amount was not disclosed.

The newly funded Tezos Stablecoin Technologies will support the development and proliferation of USDtz stablecoins on the Tezos network, and will also soon release plans for a public sale of Trustee tokens (TRU). TRU token holders will receive a share of tokens from each new Tezos-based DeFi project launched in partnership with the organization. 

A number of Tezos Finance (Tezfin) open-source projects are apparently already in the works, including lending platforms and a decentralized TEZEX exchange."

TezTech

Basics

  • The Tezos Foundation announced (7-2018) funding for TezTech, a Tezos focused software shop with several projects underway, including a trustless scaling and custody solution, as well as APIs and software libraries.

The Tezos Foundation is pleased to announce that it will issue a grant to Stephen Andrews to establish TezTech, a global Tezos software development studio.

Stephen is a widely respected contributor to the Tezos ecosystem. Some of his work includes TezBox, a multi-platform, dApp friendly wallet for Tezos, and BakeChain, a service that allows its users to bake (“validate”) on the Tezos network without having to install and maintain a full node. In addition to these two projects, the TezTech team will continue to work on:

  1. eztz.js – a Javascript library for interacting with the Tezos blockchain.
  2. fi – a high-level smart contract language for Tezos that compiles to Michelson.
  3. tzToken – a sub-token standard for Tezos.
  4. TezRPC – an RPC API that offers free access to the Tezos blockchain by providing infrastructure for developers and users.
  5. Velos – a proposed off-chain, trustless scaling method for Tezos.
  6. This grant also supports TezTech’s initial research and development of “Sona,” a decentralized identity protocol on Tezos. Sona will allow users to maintain control over their identities and seeks to be extremely modular as a way to provide value-added services to end users.
  • Has not delivered any of the products yet (8-2019) according to their website

Products

  • On the website as of 8-2019
  • TezBox was started shortly after the ICO (7-2017), and was the first available GUI wallet on the betanet. TezBox has two completed security audits (one from LeastAuthority), and was supported by the Cryptonomic team in the early days.
  • Velos Network is a proposed idea to scale transaction throughput on Tezos, similar to Lightning for Bitcoin. Velos Network integrates a 3rd party "gateway" as a trusted middleman, bound by an on-chain smart contract which penalizes bad actors. Read the paper here.
  • Sona is a proposed idea to develop a decentralized, self-sovereign identity deployed on the Tezos protocol. Sona will encompass identity verification, on-chain relationship management, private data storage and wallet management with a method to recover your identity if a private key is compromised or lost.

Team

  • Stephen Andrews; "is a Tezos developer with ten years experience in web, mobile and blockchain development."
  • Mac Stevenson Yap; "is a professional designer and UI/UX expert, with experience in mobile and web design."

Tezos South-East Asia

Basics

  • Based in Singapore, "TSA will play an active role in the growth of the Tezos ecosystem by educating individuals and groups throughout Southeast Asia about Tezos and its technology. TSA will host meetups, sponsor educational programs, and support other initiatives to further develop a vibrant and empowered Tezos community in Southeast Asia and advance the project overall."

Team

  • Caleb Kow; Director (Founder of Tezos ID, and on the board of Tezos Korea)

Investors

  • Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation to support the establishment of Tezos Southeast Asia (“TSA”).

Tezos Korea

Basics

  • "Tezos Korea Foundation will work within their respective locales to promote the Tezos protocol and educate developers, enthusiasts, and the greater business community about its technology."

Team

Investors

  • Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation

Tezos Japan

  • "Tezos Japan Foundation will work within their respective locales to promote the Tezos protocol and educate developers, enthusiasts, and the greater business community about its technology."
  • Got a grant from the Tezos Foundation

 (:

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