Tezos Infighting Moves from Board Room to Internet Forums

The cryptocurrency project, Tezos, has fallen on hard times recently.

Not only did they have to recently replaced two of their board members, but the company is also a class action lawsuit. To make things even worse, despite the fact that the company completed its now one billion-dollar ICO back in the summer of 2017, they have still not been able to launch their live main net deployment.

With all this going on, what is the general sentiment towards Tezos? Are people starting to lose faith, or are they still holding strong?

A quick review – What is Tezos?

Let's take a moment to review what Tezos is. If you're already familiar, feel free to skip this section.

Tezos is a smart contract and cryptocurrency platform that has several self-governance features. Similar to Decred, Tezos has a system designed to prevent the need for contentious hard forks. It also mitigates too much debate and disagreement locking their blockchain in place and without upgrades.

The company raised a few hundred million dollars last year, and those funds today would now be worth well over 1 billion.

"Timely launch"

According to a press release that came out in February, the Tezos foundation had two of its board members voluntarily step down. This was done in order to "serve the best interests of the Tezos project".

This ties into earlier troubles that the cryptocurrency project faced in regards to the creators of the project and another board member. They had a disagreement over who owns the Tezos intellectual property rights. And also, over who controlled the money that was raised through the ICO. These issues caused a sequence of delays and even lawsuits against the company, from within the company.

In the February press release, the foundation states that they aim to achieve a timely launch of their project. This phrasing, however, is apparently vague on purpose.

Another lawsuit, which is a class action lawsuit against Tezos is aimed at investors who want their money back. This is presumably because all of the delays and internal strife are causing investors to get nervous. The lawsuit appears to be ongoing at this point.

Tezos community in turmoil

A quick perusal of the official sub-Reddit for Tezos reveals a much higher than usual amount of shouting matches and debates. They are about not only what the community thinks Tezos should do, but also just shouting matches about "apologists" and "complainers."

Amongst the upset community is calls for the company to return all invested funds and disband. Still others say that they will never sell, and still fully believe in the project and its future.

Does Tezos have a future?

Tezos finds itself in a very difficult spot now. The legal troubles alone are very significant, and have undoubtedly caused at least many months of delays. In the cryptocurrency world, months are and incredibly long period of time.

To make things worse, the community is falling to pieces and lacks a sense of unity or purpose.

Finally, if Tezos does launch, it will find itself rubbing shoulder to shoulder with an ever increasing number of smart contract platforms. Even long-standing projects that previously didn't support smart contracts are beginning to enter the space, such as DigiByte and Bytecoin, just to name a few.

Not only that, but many other smart contract competitors have been active for quite some time, and as such have already grown supportive and solid communities.

While the situation for Tezos may seem grim, it does appear that enough of the community is willing to back it, if and when it launches. Further, the company has such a large cache of wealth that it's entirely possible they could use this to pick themselves up and get a running start.

Featured Image via Business Insider