Although the past week and the past month have not been kind to Bitcoin, not all altcoins have caught a caught from Bitcoin’s sneezes. One in particular — Tezos (XTZ) — looks pretty healthy at the moment.
Note that price information for Bitcoin and Tezos was provided by CryptoCompare.
What is Tezos?
Tezos is a general-purpose open source blockchain project that can “evolve by upgrading itself.”
Here are the main ideas in Tezos:
- Self-Amendment. This means Tezos can upgrade itself without needing a hard fork:
This is important as the suggestion or expectation of a fork can divide the community, alter stakeholder incentives, and disrupt the network effects that are formed over time. Because of self-amendment, coordination and execution costs for protocol upgrades are reduced and future innovations can be seamlessly implemented.
- On-Chain Governance. The Tezos protocol is governed by the stakeholders.
The election cycle provides a formal and systematic procedure for stakeholders to reach agreement on proposed protocol amendments. By combining this on-chain mechanism with self-amendment, Tezos can change this initial election process to adopt better governance mechanisms when they are discovered.
- Decentralized Innovation. A proposed amendment may include payment to those involved in improving the core protocol:
This funding mechanism encourages robust participation and decentralizes the maintenance of the network. Fostering an active, open, and diverse developer ecosystem that is incentivized to contribute to the protocol will facilitate Tezos development and adoption.
- Smart Contracts and Formal Verification. Tezos allows the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). It has a native smart contract language called Michelson that makes formal verification easier.
- A Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. XTZ token holders take part in the consensus process by staking (i.e. locking up) — which in Tezos land is called “staking” — their tokens for the right to validate blocks. XTZ holders may delegate their tokens to bakers whilst retaining ownership of the tokens. Bakers receive block rewards, the substantial portion of which are distributed to those XTZ token holders that delegated their tokens to them. This means that even if you do not hold enough XTZ to become a full baker you can still take part in the block validation/reward process.
The Tezos initial coin offering (ICO) was launched on 1 July 2017, managing to raise around $232 million. The Tezos Foundation launched the Tezos mainnet on 17 September 2018.
Bitcoin’s Return on Investment Figures
Here is how Bitcoin is doing today (at 12:08 UTC on November 24):
Return on investment figures (vs USD) for Bitcoin:
- 7-day: -15.43%
- 30-day: -16.93%
- 90-day: -30.52%
- Year-to-Date: +85.15%
- One-Year: +88.54%
Tezos’s Return on Investment Figures
Here is how Tezos is doing today (at 12:09 UTC on November 24):
Return on investment figures (vs USD) for Tezos:
- 7-day: +15.39%
- 30-day: +59.32%
- 90-day: +14.50%
- Year-to-Date: +184.59%
- One-Year: +135.22%
News That May Helped Tezos During the Past Few Weeks
Here are a few examples of the kind of great press coverage that Tezos has had in the past few weeks:
- November 21: Tezos Southeast Asia announced its partnership “with Tribe, the Singapore government-supported blockchain ecosystem platform, to launch its first-ever official training programme.”
- November 21: Coinbase Custody, where Tezos is currently the only supported staking asset, announced that it had transitioned to “an internationally-based staking service.”
- November 20: Nomadic Labs said via a post on LinkedIn that “the French Armies and Gendarmerie’s Information & Public Relations Center (SIRPA) had announced that since September 2019, the Gendarmerie’s cybercrime division (C3N) has been validating judicial expenses incurred during investigations and recording them on the Tezos blockchain.”
- November 14: Zurich-based FinTech startup Amun AG announced that it had launched the Amun Tezos exchange-traded product (ETP) under the XTYZ ticker on the SIX Swiss Stock Exchange.
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
