When Tezos was launched in July 2017 amongst much hype and investment frenzy, few could have foreseen the abyss into which then project subsequently fell into.
After raising $232 million in their ICO, Tezos was plunged into not just internal wrangling between the founders but also found itself embroiled in multiple lawsuits.
The problems were numerous: firstly, a suit filed by the SEC which claimed that the ICO qualified as a securities sale and therefore should have been registered with the SEC themselves.
Secondly, a rift between the Swiss-based Tezos Foundation and the original husband-and-wife project founders, Kathleen and Arthur Breitman, as to how its funds should be allocated.
Shortly after, a second suit followed, brought by a consortium of some of the original investors who are not only looking for a return of their original contributions but also compensation for opportunity cost.
As a result, many investors had resigned themselves to the fact that the Tezos platform would not go ahead and contented themselves with the belief their original investment would be returned to them after the court cases were concluded.
Return of the Tezzie?
However, speaking at the UCLA Blockchain Lab’s Cyber Days conference last weekend, founder Kathleen Breitman promised to move forward despite the ongoing legal proceedings and release the “Tezzies” tokens (XTZ) to investors “within weeks.”
Breitman’s plan is to move forward with the creation of a new foundation, The T2 Foundation, although, at this stage, it is still unclear whether this can be achieved without raising further legal complications. As a result of the announcement, the project’s pre-launch XTZ futures tokens on HitBTC exchange rose by 6%, reaching $2.92 but this remains still considerably lower than the December high of $10.51.
The Tezos project’s original vision was the creation of a competitor product to the Ethereum platform and it is understood that, despite the overarching problems dogging the project, development has nonetheless been continuing on the platform itself in some form.
