The summer of launches continues with Tezos being the latest project to go live yesterday after the Tezos Foundation launched the public blockchain.
Blocks are now being found and processed (pictured above) through staking, or as they call it, bakers. There won’t be any block rewards for the first three weeks, with the Tezos Foundation being the only staker during that period.
Afterwards, there is a somewhat complex Proof of Stake system that utilizes delegation. That might bring to mind EOS, but there is no limit to delegates in Tezos.
From the alpha documentation, it appears anyone can stake if they put down the cost of a security deposit at 512 XTZ per block created and 64 XTZ per endorsement.
Their security deposit can be forfeited if two endorsements are made, with the set-up here appearing to be a somewhat simpler version of Ethereum’s casper.
Stakers in return receive 80 tez per block, with blocks found every one minute. More correctly, the block reward is 16, while the endorser block reward is 2, with there being 32 endorsers per block. Making it a total of 80 new tezos per block or a yearly inflation of around 5% of currently 763,306,929.69 tez.
Capacity here appears to be limited at 5MB every 10 minutes, with the protocol having smart contracts. Making it pretty similar to some other blockchains, with the unique feature being in-built governance.
We tried to reach out to understand how exactly that works, but without much success. In theory, a developer is meant to propose a code change, and then stakers decide whether to accept it or not. If an 80% threshold is passed, the code change sort of automatically merges.
We may well see that in practice soon enough. The Tezos Foundation recently announced AML/KYC requirements to the anger of many tezosians. Soon enough, therefore, one of them might try and utilize this in-built governance to perhaps remove the requirement.
Shaun Belcher from the Board of Directors at Tezos Commons Foundation, says “it is a touchy subject that upset many in our community,” before further adding:
“It is unlikely to be removed, perhaps not impossible. There is a project being built to restore a level of fungibility to Genesis token holders post-KYC that will be announced in the future.”
That is only the latest of controversies in this project which raised 65,630 bitcoins and 361,122 eth, worth at the time $230 million, in July 2017.
A dispute between the founders led to even class action lawsuit threats from investors, with Arthur Breitman, Tezos’ lead dev, eventually effectively saying either the foundation launches or he will do so himself.
That checkmate of sorts opened the way for yesterday’s launch, with just how difficult the pre-launch times were shown by a reddit moderator announcing a “general amnesty.” He says:
“Everyone unbanned on RIOT and most non-spam accounts on Reddit. Welcome home. We have had some trials and tribulations. Whatever our disagreements and suffering, let it pass and go. Let’s look to a bright future, together.”
Whether the future for Tezos will indeed be bright, time will say, but Belcher says Tim Draper, a VC who backed the project, “was always supportive of Tezos even through the difficult times.”
Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn of Zcash was listed as an advisor during the ICO days. “Zooko is a close friend of the Breitmans so yes he has always been involved,” Belcher says.
Emin Gün Sirer, who was also listed as an advisor, told trustnodes he is still advising, so the Cornell Professor is still around the project.
Which makes this a somewhat happy ending after some very tough navigation through very difficult waters, but the project still has a long way ahead.
Wallets are only starting to come out for tezos. Exchanges will probably eventually list it, but why a dapp might want to run on tezos rather than eth is not an easy question to answer.
As a public blockchain that aims to be decentralized they of course have the same scalability limitations, with the only advantage being in extremely rare events where they might be able to better address a potential dispute between developers or developers and holders.
Something which may make the project interesting from one angle, or at least different, but it has a lot of catching up to do, and whether it can gain even a reasonable market share of smart contract development considering the far more developed ethereum ecosystem, only time can say.
Copyrights Trustnodes.com
