Tezos Jumps 46% Ahead Of Monday's Blockchain Launch

Tezos Foundation (CRYPTO: XTZ) launched on Monday its blockchain protocol which is now fully operational and managed by the Tezos community. The XTZ token rose to $1.68 early Monday gaining 46% from a one-week low of $1.15. (Update: Tezos has trended downward to $1.55 as of press time.) Over the weekend, cryptocurrency investors gobbled up the digital coin in anticipation of price increase right before the mainnet launch on Sept. 17. Trading volume rose 169% on Friday to a nine-week high of $5.1 million. XTZ is the 16th-largest crypto with a market capitalization of $950 million, per CoinMarketCap. In the next few weeks, it could make a push for top-12 status. (The story continues below.)

Have a great weekend, everyone, because mainnet arrives Monday!

— Tezos Foundation (@TezosFoundation) September 14, 2018

"A development team … tested and refined the codebase, working tirelessly leading up to the launch," wrote Ryan Jesperson, president of Tezos Foundation in a statement. "Ultimately, the Foundation proposed a genesis block and the betanet phase of the network went live. The team’s hard work to propose this genesis block may never get its full due, but I want to thank them once again for that exceptional effort." Jesperson said the entity's long-term mission is to advance the Tezos protocol, ecosystem and community. Concerns About Governance Tezos' initial coin offering (ICO) in July 2017 was one of the largest token sales ever — raising $232 million. PricewaterhouseCoopers ("PwC") Switzerland has since been hired as independent external auditor which makes Tezos the first major blockchain organization to have a "Big Four" accounting firm serve as auditor. Earlier this month, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin expressed on Zcash's (ZEC) YouTube channel his reservations about governance protocols that let big players obtain large voting blocks, taking aim at projects such as Tezos and EOS (CRYPTO: EOS). "A couple of years ago I would have been more firmly in the Tezos-EOS camp that says there should be explicit on-chain governance. And now I’m like absolutely against that and I think that stuff is crazy." Buterin added, "What this voting mechanism has created is it creates this kind of superlinear pro-plutocratic effect …" Jesperson said in the same blog post that Tezos Foundation won't act as central authority. "The Foundation does not seek to be, nor attempt to serve as, some kind of central authority with regard to Tezos. But know that we are committed to communicating more openly about the Foundation’s role and our efforts to support this vibrant and strong community." Liquid Proof-Of-Stake (LPOS) Other major crypto projects implement a protocol known as Delegated Proof-Of-Stake. These include EOS, Tron (TRX) and Lisk (LSK). In contrast, Tezos' protocol allows token holders to transfer/delegate validation rights to other token holders without transferring ownership. Delegation is optional, according to Jason Arluck on Tezos' blog. "I propose we instead refer to Tezos' consensus mechanism as 'Liquid Proof-of-Stake' or 'LPOS'. LPOS aims to maintain a dynamic validator set, facilitating token holder coordination and accountable governance." Tezos uses inflationary block rewards and transaction fees to incentivize validators ("bakers") to participate in consensus. "To incentivize honest behavior around the time of block creation, Tezos requires a baker to put up a safety deposit for several weeks," says Arluck. "If a baker explicitly tries to double bake or double sign blocks, it forfeits this safety deposit."