Tezos is “a decentralized blockchain that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth and facilitates formal verification, a technique which mathematically proves the correctness of the code governing transactions and boosts the security of the most sensitive or financial weighted smart contracts.” This actually means that Tezos is a blockchain network which is correlated to a digital token, called a Tez (XTZ). Unlike other digital currencies, Tezos does not involve the mining of Tez tokens. Instead, token holders receive a reward for taking part in the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism which of course has its pros and cons.
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Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Tezos is a decentralized ledger which makes use of blockchain technology. Like Ethereum, Tezos is designed to make use of smart contracts (“Tezos” is ancient Greek for “smart-contract,” according to the developers - which is probably kind of silly but at least eye-catching I suppose).
Unlike these preceding cryptocurrencies and networks, however, Tezos takes the smart contract concept “one step further by letting participants directly control the rules of the network.”It is a network that constantly evelves. There will never be any forks of Tezos as they will not be required. Instead, the holders will decide on all the changes to the cryptocurrency and develop it together: “Tezos takes a fundamentally different approach by creating governance rules for stakeholders to approve of protocol upgrades that are then automatically deployed on the network," its developers claim. "When a developer proposes a protocol upgrade, they can attach an invoice to be paid out to their address upon approval and inclusion of their upgrade.” This approach serves two purposes. One is to further decentralize the network and the other is to never stop developing and advancing the network.
Tezos gathered one of the largest ICOs in history, collecting a total of 228,200,000 USD though how much it amounts to depends on the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum at any moment in history. Enoygh to say that the ICO collected 65,681 Bitcoins and 361,122 Ethereum.
Despite a promising start, Tezos has encountered numerous delays - some have even resulted in legal problems. Following the successful ICO, a major dispute took place between Tezos's founder and president Johann Gevers and Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, the owners of Tezos’ intellectual property rights. As a result of the dispute, the launch of the Tezos platform itself was delayed. Currently it is live though and the future looks bright for the project.
Tezos has managed to gain the interest of arguably the most blockchain savvy VC - Tim Draper, who has included Tezos to his portfolio. From a certain perspective Tezos, after lauching its mainnent, posesses the qualites that more established projects still only strive for, i.e. Ethereum. The Tezos Proof of Stake is indeed something to admire and the potential degree of return on an investment can be significant!