Tezos Gets New Life In A Rare Second Chance
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Tezos is one of those projects that appears destined to survive. Rising from the ashes after the inferno between the Swiss foundation and project leaders, the platform seems stronger than ever, with the focus back where it should be — on the technology and the talent that co-founder Arthur Breitman has to offer.
It’s unclear if Tezos has nine lives; but it at least has two, as evidenced by the community’s decision to welcome Ryan Jesperson, who is at the helm of the Tezos Foundation, as the new face of the project. Tezos is perhaps best known for its blockbuster $232 million ICO and the scandal that rocked the project afterward. These days, however, with Jesperson at the helm of the foundation in Zug, Switzerland, Tezos has a new life and a new funding.
In a recent interview with Luzerner Zeitung, Jesperson revealed that the project has “more than after the fundraising in 2017,” which is “enough money for the future.” Not all of it is in XTZ, however. After learning a thing or two about risk, they’ve diversified and are also “converting assets out of cryptocurrencies. “
Jesperson, who relocated from the U.S. to Crypto Valley to spearhead the foundation, has been making the rounds, most recently having been a featured speaker at the Infrachain blockchain conference in Bern and is participating in a meetup hosted by the Crypto Valley Forum at Rathaus Zug on Dec. 6.
The XTZ Token Holds Its Own As Venture Investors Buy
And while the XTZ token is trading below its original ICO price of $0.51 at approximately $0.36, it hasn’t fallen as far as some of its peers like Ethereum. And as Jovan Smith of iBuyTezos.com points out on Twitter, “Tezos wasn’t even on an exchange in January of 2018.” The reason, of course, is because the network didn’t launch until mid-2018 amid the infighting at the project on the heels of the ICO.
Venture investor Dean Patrick of G2H2 Capital is bullish on Tezos, telling Crypto Briefing today:
I have actually recently increased my stake as a result of the more attractive valuation of late. In general, Tezos reminds me a lot of Ethereum in the early days. They have a brilliant and slightly eccentric founder, a pure bitcoin-esque mindset in terms of not dictating to the community how they feel Tezos should be utilized, and a total focus on pushing the tech forward.
In a recent podcast, Patrick stated that he would like to see more “developer support” at Tezos, however, that is along the lines of the “passion for the community” that Buterin has demonstrated through “helping investors find their lost ETH,” for instance.
Tezos Charts Its Own Path
Tezos may bear some resemblance to Ethereum for features like smart contracts, but it has its own personality, with the XTZ tokens affectionately referred to as ‘Tezzies’ and investors who hold them given the opportunity to vote on updates to the system. Instead of miners, Tezos relies on bakers who are “randomly selected to create a block.”
The Tezos white paper also mentions technology like zero-knowledge proofs and Zerocash, all of which are part of what makes Zcash a privacy coin. Incidentally, the self-amending decentralized protocol counts the Zcash Founder among its advisers, and GitLab contributor Sophia Gold has published a commit on Tezos referencing shielded transactions, zero-knowledge proofs and zk-SNARKs.
Implementing this technology would position Tezos among the ranks of privacy coins, which could make things awkward around the conference table for Wilcox.
The author is currently invested in ETH.
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