Tezos (XTZ) Founding Team Overview

Tezos (XTZ), a decentralized, open-source blockchain, was co-founded in 2017 by Arthur Breitman and Kathleen Breitman. The Breitmans remain at the core of Tezos development, with their combined technical and business expertise playing a crucial role in the early inception and subsequent growth of the platform.

Arthur Breitman

Arthur Breitman has a background in computer science, mathematics, and finance. Before founding Tezos, Arthur had worked for numerous prominent financial companies, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, primarily focusing on quantitative trading. Notably, he also worked at Waymo, a subsidiary of Google specializing in autonomous driving technology.

Arthur’s experience in software development and his critical stance toward the inefficiencies of early blockchains, such as Bitcoin, were key inspirations behind the creation of Tezos. He was particularly interested in addressing the governance and scalability issues that he observed in the first-generation blockchains — an idea that formed the backbone of Tezos, which features a formal on-chain governance model to enable future upgrades without contentious hard forks.

Arthur initially authored Tezos’ whitepaper under the pseudonym "LM Goodman," inspired by the same pseudonymous figure responsible for founding Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. His belief in formal verification to improve the safety and functionality of smart contracts also influenced some of the platform's key technological choices.

Kathleen Breitman

Kathleen Breitman, who co-founded Tezos alongside her husband Arthur, brings a wealth of experience from her background in business development and project management. Before working on Tezos, Kathleen held senior positions at prominent companies such as R3 and Accenture, where she worked on distributed ledger technologies and financial systems, further solidifying her expertise in blockchain-related fields.

Kathleen played a significant role in positioning Tezos within the blockchain ecosystem, contributing heavily to its fundraising efforts. Under her leadership, Tezos was able to secure one of the largest initial coin offerings (ICOs) of its time, raising over $230 million. Kathleen has been known for her candidness in discussing the challenges the Tezos project faced during its early stages and provided key insight into operational management and strategy within the ecosystem’s founding structure.

Tezos Foundation

The Tezos Foundation was established as the primary entity responsible for funding and overseeing the core development of the platform. After the initial token offering, the foundation, based in Switzerland, was tasked with managing its funds. The foundation has since continued to focus on protocol development, solutions for scalability, and fostering ecosystem growth.

While Arthur and Kathleen Breitman were essential in the technical and strategic founding of Tezos, the Tezos Foundation has served to institutionalize the project and run its operational back end, aiming to ensure that the long-term goals of Tezos are met through continued research, development, and grants.