The Tezos ICO was initially scheduled for Monday, May 22, is now delayed "until some time in June".
Tezos is a decentralized blockchain that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth.
Tezos has received vocal and financial backing from Tim Draper, the famed billionaire who bought a massive stack of coins from the federal government at auction following the Silk Road seizures.
Reading their overview document, it seems that part of the problem they aim to solve is that of politically-charged debates like are currently ongoing in the Bitcoin world. On a daily basis, people on both “sides” of the argument make vitriolic and often inane statements about people on the other. While people may interpret the recent price spikes in Bitcoin as some sort of reward for “holding the line” or what have you, a longer view would suggest that big money is really waking up to the realities of cryptocurrency.
The Tezos team spent a lot of time assessing and addressing the problems of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and beyond. Novelty is important when it comes to releasing new technology, especially financial technology. People will tend to stick with the known and tested unless there is something radically different about the newly offered alternative. So what is novel about Tezos? Well, in their own words, self-governance. But how does that work?
first generation blockchains tend to empower, de facto, centralized core development teams or miners to formulate design choices. Tezos takes a fundamentally different approach by creating governance rules for stakeholders to approve of protocol upgrades that are then automatically deployed on the network.
Ethereum and others sought to address this problem by allowing anyone to create a token with its own rules of distribution and usage. Tezos is even more open than that because 1) it can do that too and 2) further expansion can be added later with a suggestion and a vote by the stakeholders.
Tezos also takes lessons from failed initiatives that have tried to do some of what it is doing. Its Smart Contract language focuses on “correctness” and its initial version avoids some of the problems already experienced by smart contract languages in the past.
There are other notable differentiations with Tezos. One is that inactive addresses will not be able to stake coins.
Who Is Behind Tezos
While mass media credit the husband-wife team of Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, both with backgrounds in institutional finance, they are not solely to credit for the work being done. In the overview document, Gordon Mohr and L. M. Goodman are credited with the spearheading of the thought leadership. (Mohr once worked for Archive.org and Goodman comes from good, legitimate crypto-anarchist stock).
Kathleen and Arthur Breitman both actively identify as crypto-anarchists, a long-standing tradition of people who believe that technology should set people free and that cryptography is the best way to ensure this (to overly simplify the philosophy). They actually met at a gathering of such in New York City and fell in love shortly thereafter. They own and have to date funded the company which is primarily developing the technology for Tezos at present, Dynamic Ledger Solutions. This means they bear more than a short mention, but it is worth reiterating that part and parcel to the concept of Tezos is that they can easily be replaced by competitor development firms and others with a simple vote of the stakeholding class in the Tezos economy.
Also working on the project are a number of experienced developers, including Guillem Rieu, who wrote his own wiki software and has worked on parts of the Ripple project.
Negatives
One drawback is that they do not intend to cap the coin supply. Limited supply is part of the high value of Bitcoin and gold alike, but it is not the only value-creator out there. The actual initial supply of coins will be based on public interest, rather than a set figure.
This unlimited supply of coins will mean that we should all be able to buy into the ICO, but the value of the token will be diluted. Also, a massive ICO may draw too much attention to the company too early, distracting the team from building their project.