A beginner's guide to Tezos, the self-evolving governance model cryptoforbs

Over the years, we have seen many blockchain platforms aiming to launch self-sustaining smart contracts and decentralized applications.

Some good examples are Ethereum, NEO, and Qtum. Each of them took different approaches to implementing their ideas and goals.

However, there is one problem they have with similar blockchains – Judgment.

And if you’ve been paying attention, one of the big topics of 2018 was about manageable blockchains.

Why governable?

Well, because blockchains like Ethereum, NEO or Qtum are not self-governing and therefore have a lot of reliability over a few human players for the same thing.

But there is one blockchain platform that does it in a completely different way. So much so that it seems they have solved the problem.

he meets Tezos.

In this fundamental analysis of Tezos, we’ll look at:

What is Tezos?
How it works?
Tezos features
Team Tezos
Tezos ICO: Total supply of Tezos
How to buy Tezos cryptocurrency
Tezos Governor
Tezos future and roadmap
Official Tezos Resources

What is Tezos?

Tezos is an open source decentralized blockchain platform for smart contracts and decentralized applications with a formal governance model.

Here, the governance model is neither ad hoc nor planned. Rather, it is self-development.

That’s why Tezos calls itself a self-modifying blockchain that can evolve according to industry needs without forking over and over with hard forks.

In the words of its creators:

Tezos is a blockchain that can evolve by upgrading itself. Stakeholders vote on amendments to the protocol, including amendments to the voting procedures themselves, to reach social consensus on the proposals. Tezos supports smart contracts and provides a platform for building decentralized applications.

The Tezos blockchain also implemented a native cryptocurrency called Tezos (XTZ) which acts as fuel for the blockchain, just like Ether in Ethereum. (More on this later)

How does Tezos work?

The Tezos blockchain is developed in a modular fashion with a public, self-modifying cryptographic ledger. This is accomplished through a native middleware called “Network Shell” (more on this later).

The blockchain protocol can be divided into these three layers, which are:

Network protocol
Transaction protocol
Consensus protocol

The network protocol is the gossip protocol which is responsible for listening to peers and broadcasting between nodes.

The transaction protocol is responsible for the transaction layer and accounting model that the blockchain implements for its transactions, such as UTXOs for Bitcoin.

The consensus layer, as its name suggests, aims to reach agreement on the status of transactions that have occurred or will occur.

Here, the combined transaction and consensus protocols are sometimes referred to as blockchain protocols. The network shell is responsible for the communication between the network protocol and the blockchain protocols.

This is possible because the network envelope is riser:

Blocks
Transactions
And protocols

Even these protocols can be modified by the network envelope based on community consensus. Hence it works by maintaining the best chain known to the customer. This is called a self-modifying blockchain or on-chain governance.

Tezos features

Self-editing

The self-modifying feature helps in upgrading the blockchain without undergoing a hard fork. Hard forks are generally not good for the community because they destroy the network effects that the community has worked for so far.

On-chain governance

Cross-chain governance is nothing more than a vote on the platform on a proposed protocol amendment. But with a combination of on-chain governance and a self-modifying event, the voting process can be modified according to the needs of the time. This vote will be done by the platform’s stakeholders. (We’ll talk more about stakeholders later)

Smarter contracts and formal verification

Tezos is used MichelsonIt is a functional programming language for smart contracts and decentralized applications. Having such a language is very useful as it helps in formal verification. Formal verification simply means proving mathematically that a particular piece of code will behave as expected and as coded. But this does not mean that it is a complete guide otherwise there will be no errors in the code after formal verification. Instead, it serves as a warning to prevent costly mistakes as we saw during the DAO Ethereum attack.

Proof of stake

Tezos is a delegated proof of stake system that requires a person to stake a certain number of Tezos tokens to participate in the consensus on the blockchain. The process of storing Tezos (XTZ) tokens is called baking in the Tezos ecosystem through which nodes or participants can earn more XTZ and secure the blockchain at the same time.

Team Tezos

The Tezos team consists of an amazing couple and also co-founders who have passed the test of time in launching Tezos amidst many hurdles which we will discuss at the end.

Here’s a peek at some of the other names of her team members:

Tezos ICO: Total supply of Tezos

Initially, there were 10 billion tokens available for sale but this was not the final supply. Instead, the total token supply was determined based on the number of tokens sold in an initial coin offering (ICO) in mid-2017.

It was one of the largest initial coin offerings (ICO) ever concluded in cryptocurrency history at the time because it raised $232 million.

Currently, it depends CoinMarketCapthe total circulating supply of Tezos is 607,489,041 XTZ and the current price per unit is $2, valuing it at about $1.2 billion (At the time of writing this article).

How to buy Tezos cryptocurrency

Buying Tezos is not easy since very few exchanges are currently buying/selling Tezos. Part of this is due to the extreme delay in its release.

However, if you are someone who appreciates its technology, here are some exchanges where you can buy Tezos:

Gate.io: Supported pairs are XTZ/BTC, XTZ/ETH, and XTZ/USTD

Tezos Governor

Tezos is not an ERC20 token so it has limited wallet options yet. But the team is working on developing new wallets steadily and some of them are:

Web wallet: Kukai, TezBox,
Mobile phone wallet: TezBoxtesos.blue(iOS, Android, Windows)
Desktop wallet: atomic wallet, Kukai

Since it is a new entrant to the cryptocurrency market, finding a hardware wallet for Tezos is not possible yet.

Tezos future and roadmap

I think the future of Tezos will be exciting, but before discussing the future, let’s take a look at the history.

Well, after the successful Tezos ICO, there was a falling out between the founders and the head of the Tezos Foundation. Additionally, class action lawsuits were filed and the SEC was also involved in declaring Tezos as a security.

But all these issues were dealt with courageously by the Tezos team, but this delayed the development of the project for about 8-10 months. Here’s the full story of the Tezos saga, as told Founder.

Tezos finally launched its testnet at the beginning of July 2018. It is a testnet that is constantly being developed and improved by its team. It is also all set to launch its mainnet in Q3 2018.

As much as I applaud the founders and development team for launching the beta, it was disappointing not to be able to find a properly laid out roadmap for a project worth a quarter of a billion dollars.

Also, when you’re competing with other blockchain platforms and smart contract platforms like Ethereum and NEO, you need a plan.

Additionally, your website should have proper documentation such as Lisk or Ethereum to make it easier for developers to rely on you.

On these fronts, Tezos is lagging behind, but if we give it the benefit of the doubt for a while because it has only just recovered, I think these things should be in place as the mainnet launch rolls out. Otherwise, it will be very difficult for Tezos to survive.

And finally, their smart contract language (Michelson) is completely unknown to the world which will also take a decent learning curve for developers.