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Tezos, an up-and-coming blockchain, has launched its mainnet. On Twitter, the Tezos Foundation teased the community over the weekend about the update’s release:

The update is mainly a formality. A community-authored FAQ, which was retweeted by CEO Kathleen Breitman, assures users that “basically nothing changes.” The FAQ notes that no bugs were discovered during Tezos’ betanet phase and that tokens will automatically carry over: “all betanet Tezos are real Tezos.”

Although there are few, if any, changes under the hood, the Tezos community expects the mainnet will be Tezos’ big break. The token’s price spiked by over 30% and reached $1.65 yesterday, returning to a value it briefly held in mid-August.

What Makes Tezos Different?

A number of features distinguish Tezos from other blockchains. First of all, Tezos is “self-amending,” which means that the blockchain can be upgraded without undergoing a hard fork:

“We wish to avoid hard-forks because, as a mechanism for introducing innovative but contentious changes, they tend to be centralizing. We do not do it out of some weird intrinsic rejection of hard-forks. We value pragmatism.”

Like most recent blockchains, Tezos also offers smart contracts. However, it restricts code to simple logic that can be formally verified. This is important because an effective verification process can detect bugs that would otherwise lead to major hacks.

Finally, the platform has its own original liquid proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. In some ways, Tezos uses a classical proof-of-stake mechanism like Ethereum soon will. In other ways, Tezos implements delegation like EOS and TRON do. This is possible because Tezos makes delegation a choice for users instead of a core feature.

Suggested Reading Learn more about hard forks here.

A Long Journey

Tezos originated as a phenomenally successful ICO in July 2017, but it has not been smooth sailing for the project. The project made the news when it became a target of lawsuits concerning securities regulations.

Tezos nevertheless survived the controversy. Since then, the project has selected a “big four” auditor to work with and has given away $30 million worth of grants to community developers. Tezos has continued to perform well and currently ranks #16 by market cap.

The platform may make major steps forward in the near future. It was recently reported that co-founder and CEO Kathleen Breitman is entering the video game market. Although this will involve a separate company, Breitman has acknowledged that her project will make use of the blockchain and smart contracts. Little has been revealed, but it seems likely that this will be a use case for Tezos.

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