Translated material
The TEZOS startup came up with a competitor to Bitcoin and ether. I raised $ 200 million, and then almost burned out due to the quarrel of the creators: The Wired
In 2017, the TEZOS blockchain startup spent one of the most successful ICO procedures at that time, collecting more than 200 million dollars. Then, for more than six months, the company did not actually work due to the conflict of its leaders. The story of Tezos, who positioned himself as a competitor to Bitcoin and Ether, said the publication The Wireed.
Arthur Breitman grew up in France. He received a bronze medal at the International Informatics Olympiad, studied applied mathematics and computer science at the Polytechnic School in Paris, after which he moved to the United States and worked in large banks. In 2013, he married Kathleen McCefrey, whom he met at a meeting of anarcho-capitals.
Breitman was interested in cryptocurrencies; He bought the first bitcoins even when almost no one heard about them, and dreamed of creating his own blockchain platform. In the summer of 2014, Breitman described his project through a closed ICIL Snift, whose participants in 2008 were first represented by the Bitcoin concept. TEZOS - this was the name of the Breitman's project - was supposed to be the first crypto register in the world in which the changes made to the cryptocurrency protocol are controlled by the holders of units of this cryptocurrency, and not just its developers.
Almost no one paid attention to the TEZOS concept. Unable to interest his project of corporate investors, Breitman decided to attract funding with the help of ICO . To do this, he turned to his friend Johann Gevers, who participated in the organization of the ICO blockchain platform Ethereum. At the time of acquaintance with Breitman, Gevers lived in the Swiss canton of Tsug, which was called the "cryptodolina" due to favorable conditions for cryptoostarts.
Arthur and Kathleen Breitman founded Tezos Foundation. The president of the company was Gevers, who received the right to sole access to her bank accounts and cells. In July 2017, Tezos Foundation conducted ICO. For 13 days, the startup managed to raise 232 million dollars, which became one of the best results of the ICO at that time. After the successful completion, ICO Tezos Foundation began to develop blockchain platforms.
Already from the first days of work between the Breitmans and Gevers, disagreements began, and in September a serious conflict broke out between them. Gevers said that he had done the work of the executive director of Tezos Foundation, and demanded payment for it. The amount he claimed was calculated by millions of dollars. Breitman refused to pay. In response, Gevers announced the suspension of all the activities of Tezos Foundation before resolving the issue with his contract. He blocked the digital assets of the company nominated in bitcoins and broadcasts, and stopped paying developers.
In October 2017, Breitmanov’s lawyers demanded that the board of directors of Tezos Foundation send Gevers to resign, accusing him of “disloyal management” and the desire to “get a license for printing money”. Their letter came to Reuters reporters who published a big investigation about Tezos. It stated that the company is on the verge of collapse due to the struggle for power in its leadership.
A week after the release of the article, TEZOS tokens holders filed a first collective lawsuit; They accused the company of violation of securities legislation, unscrupulous advertising and dishonest competition. Over the next months, TEZOS Foundation filed a number of claims. Meanwhile, the company's activities were still frozen, and the cost of the capital raised by it grew; In December 2017, when the price of bitcoin reached 20 thousand dollars, it amounted to 1.2 billion dollars.
In the conflict of Gevers and Breitmanov, TEZOS tokens holders were on the side of the latter. In December 2017, 1700 people from 95 countries signed a petition calling for Gevers to leave Tezos. And two months later, a group of company tokens announced the basis of T2 Foundation, an alternative company for creating a Tezos blockchain platform. T2 began to help the Breitmans, who began to develop it from their own means.
The founder of T2 Foundation Ryan Jesperson at the end of February achieved Gverse; What compensation he received upon dismissal is definitely not known. Jesperson himself became the new head of Tezos Foundation. The company is going to present the beta version of its blockchain platform until the end of summer.
When everyone found out about TEZOS Fiasco, the company's name has become a synonym for the greed of crypto entrepreneurs. The author of one of the news sites about Ethereum wrote: "Tezos has become a reminder for all of us that greed can destroy great ideas and enterprises." Reddit users called Tezos the “largest scam from the time [the bankrupt Japanese bitcoin foreign] Mt. Gox. Maybe Gevers was a bad guy in this story, some suggested, but it was the Breitmans who made him the main one in the company (English.).