Since its launch in 2018, the Tezos project has overcome challenges and made tremendous strides. And as we focus on the path forward, I have never felt more excited for its future than I do today.
Tezos is founded on a bold idea: that a decentralized cryptocurrency could support upgrades ratified by token holders without sacrificing network effects, effectively “future-proofing” itself. That vision exists in its current instantiation. Technical innovations are “folded” in, rather than realized through bulky hard forks. It is this truly democratic framework — the consent from a supermajority of token holders rather than diktat by a…
Tl;dr, I have a new company called Coase and we’re releasing a game into alpha. You can sign up here to learn more.
For those who studied economics, Ronald Coase needs no introduction. The 1991 Nobel laureate is most famous for his contributions to our understanding of the frictions and incentives associated with production in the modern world.
In “The Nature of the Firm,” Coase observes that, because markets are costly to use, the most efficient production process often takes place within a firm. As Kevin Werbach notes in his latest book, this can be understood as a response to…
I wrote this in June 2016 but wanted to link to it while writing a piece today.
Three weeks [2019 edit: and 2 years] ago I sat on a panel with the CEO of a company trying to modernize trade finance. When asked to talk about the benefits of blockchain technology, he asserted that blockchain has solved trust.
Blockchain technology hasn’t solved trust. It can’t. Nothing can “solve” trust. Trust is an attitude towards a proposition or entity. Motivations for trusting another party come from a variety of evidence, from faith in the enforcement power of a legal system to…
I get asked a lot of questions about similar blockchain projects to Tezos. This is extremely reasonable. Recently, we came across a post from BOScoin’s blog making a comparative chart of governance systems.
Of course we don’t think the chart is entirely complete. The “Governance Features” section is, in our humble opinion, a bit lacking.
When we released our paper in 2014, governance was largely ignored in the field of cryptographic ledgers. Nowadays, it’s impossible to find a project that doesn’t mention “governance.” We posit that governance is the set of rules by which a resource is shared. In a…
Blockchain governance doesn’t fit squarely into any existing model.
Tezos is a blockchain with a first-in-kind implementation of a native governance mechanism. All proposed changes to the protocol are decided upon by the community, then pushed automatically to the network. By providing a way to decide upon and enforce upgrades in a decentralized fashion, our team believes we can launch an innovative platform that does not fall privy to the whims of a centralized core development team.
When people first hear about our platform, they typically relate it to a governance structure they’re familiar with. …
Some thoughts on the silliness of “Blockchain, not Bitcoin.”
I recently left my job in the private blockchain space to pursue a project in the public blockchain space. Upon seeing the change in my LinkedIn title, several people approached me to inquire about why I had left the private blockchain space. Many of my email threads expanded into questions about the viability of private blockchain models.
I think the hype around “blockchain” in the popular press has taken on a different, more aggressive flavor than the coverage of some comparably revolutionary technology (AI, robotics, etc.) which enjoyed decades of research…
I recently left my job to manage the release of Tezos, a decentralized crypto-ledger with a native, on-chain governance mechanism. In light of the momentum around App Coins, whereby developers build specially marked tokens to power applications on an existing network (which can be converted in-and-out of the main network token), we have been asked about our strategy around App Coins. After all, the market for App Coins is extremely hot with ~$250 mm raised for a handful of projects.
Though Tezos permits the creation of App Coins, we do not focus on them. Our primary line of reasoning is…
My mom is a smart lady but she’s not an avowed cypherpunk or CS professor. Here’s how I explain Tezos to her.
Over the last five years, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have come into some popularity. To date, the cryptocurrency market is ~$13bn across the leading efforts in the space. These projects can serve many uses, like offering a native digital asset of the Internet or providing alternative stores of value for the unbanked/those subject to poor monetary policy.
These applications are powered by a blockchain. In a cryptocurrency, a blockchain registers and validates transactions in a public ledger, removing…
(Originally posted here)
As a Cambrian explosion of blockchain solutions floods the press and marketplace, there have been several calls for creating standards and interoperability between blockchains. The common historical episode cited to invoke collaboration is the “videotape format war” between VHS and Betamax in the 1970s and 80s. However, interoperability between blockchain-enabled ledgers is a much more interesting and difficult problem that may not be solved easily.
In order to illustrate my point, it is important to draw a distinction between information networks and consensus networks. Information networks generally act as conduits for getting data from point A to…
I wrote this in an effort to create a primer for executives when “blockchain” started to become popular in the summer of 2015.
PART I
What are blockchains?
Blockchains are a way to implement a distributed ledger, a record of consensus with a cryptographic audit trail which is maintained and validated by several separate nodes. Blockchains sit ‘below’ a distributed ledger and act as a way to order and validate the transactions in the ledger. To that end, you can say that blockchains are a way to achieve the consensus necessary for a distributed ledger.
Though the concept of a distributed ledger…
