Tezos (XTZ)

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Historical price evolution of Tezos

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Tezos was born in 2014 when Arthur Breitman, former employee of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, published the project's technical documents under the pseudonym "L.M. Goodman". Breitman's central proposal was revolutionary: to create a blockchain capable of updating itself through voting by its holders, thus eliminating the need for divisive hard forks like those that had fragmented Bitcoin and Ethereum. The following year, Arthur and Kathleen Breitman founded Dynamic Ledger Solutions (DLS) in Delaware to develop the project, contracting the company OCamlPro to develop the protocol in OCaml language.

On 17th April 2017, the Tezos Foundation was established in Zug, Switzerland, with Johann Gevers as president to manage the imminent initial coin offering. On 1st July 2017, Tezos launched its ICO which became a historical milestone by raising $232 million (66,000 BTC and 361,000 ETH) in just two weeks, establishing itself as the largest ICO in history up to that point.

However, the initial success transformed into a deep crisis between 2017 and 2018. The Breitmans entered into a serious conflict with Johann Gevers over control of the ICO funds. Gevers refused to release the funds to DLS, whilst the Breitmans publicly accused him of "self-dealing, self-promotion and conflicts of interest". This dispute caused repeated delays in the network launch and triggered class-action lawsuits by investors. The crisis was resolved in February 2018 when Gevers resigned and Ryan Jesperson assumed the presidency of the Foundation, finally allowing the release of the funds.

In June 2018, the Tezos Foundation implemented mandatory KYC/AML verification for ICO participants with more than a year's delay, which caused problems for thousands of users to claim their tokens. Finally, in September 2018 the Tezos mainnet was launched and the XTZ (Tezzie) token began trading on exchanges, although the price immediately fell from approximately $4 to $1.10 due to sales by ICO participants.

On 30th May 2019, Tezos achieved a technological milestone by implementing its first protocol upgrade through on-chain governance called "Athens A", becoming the first blockchain in history to update without a hard fork through voting by its holders. Since then, the protocol has continued evolving: in 2023 the "Mumbai" and "Nairobi" upgrades were implemented, in February 2024 the "Oxford 2" upgrade introduced private Smart Rollups, and in January 2025 the "Quebec" upgrade reduced block time to 8 seconds.

Tezos operates as a smart contract blockchain based on the Liquid Proof-of-Stake (LPoS) consensus mechanism, where XTZ token holders participate in transaction validation and network security. The system allows any holder with at least 8,000 XTZ to become a "baker" (validator), assuming responsibility for producing blocks and voting on protocol proposals. Users with smaller amounts can delegate their stake to a baker of their choice, maintaining custody of their tokens at all times whilst receiving staking rewards of around 5-6% annually.

The distinctive characteristic of Tezos is its on-chain governance system with self-amendment capability, which allows protocol updates without the need for contentious hard forks. This process develops across four consecutive phases: proposal, exploration, cooldown and adoption, where XTZ holders vote directly on protocol improvements and these are automatically implemented across all nodes once approved. Smart contracts are programmed in Michelson, a low-level language specifically designed to enable formal mathematical verification of code before deployment, thereby reducing the risk of vulnerabilities. XTZ does not have an established maximum supply, as new tokens are continuously issued as rewards for bakers participating in network consensus.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.