What Is Tezos?

Tezos is a self-amending Layer 1 proof-of-stake blockchain for smart contracts and digital assets. Its defining feature is on-chain governance: token holders can propose, vote on, and adopt protocol upgrades through a structured cycle, allowing the network to evolve without hard forks. Tezos has emphasized formal verification, energy efficiency, and institutional-grade security since its launch in 2018, and over the years has shipped more than twenty named protocol upgrades.

Overview - Table of Contents
What Is Tezos?
Getting Started With Tezos
How To Get A Tezos Wallet?
Tezos Resources
How To Buy Tezos?
Latest Tezos News

Tezos was co-founded by Arthur Breitman and Kathleen Breitman, who originally published the Tezos position and white papers in 2014 (Arthur wrote them under the pseudonym "L. M. Goodman"). Arthur, an ex-Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley quant, designed the architecture; Kathleen, with a background that includes Accenture, Bridgewater Associates, the Wall Street Journal, and R3, led the corporate strategy through Dynamic Ledger Solutions. Tezos held its ICO in July 2017, raising roughly $232 million, one of the largest token sales at the time. The mainnet activated in September 2018 after a public dispute between the Breitmans and Johann Gevers, the then-president of the Swiss Tezos Foundation, was eventually resolved via Gevers's resignation and a board reshuffle.

Tezos uses a consensus model called Liquid Proof of Stake (LPoS). Token holders, known as delegators, can delegate their XTZ to bakers, the network's validators, who produce and attest to blocks. Bakers earn rewards proportional to their stake (their own plus delegated) and pass a share back to delegators. The current consensus algorithm, Tenderbake, provides deterministic finality, with block times reduced to roughly 8 seconds following the Quebec upgrade in early 2025.

The other defining feature of Tezos is on-chain protocol amendment. Any baker can submit a proposal that changes the protocol's behavior, including the amendment process itself. Proposals progress through a five-phase voting cycle (Proposal, Exploration, Cooldown, Promotion, and Adoption), and successful upgrades are activated automatically without a hard fork. This mechanism has shipped more than twenty named upgrades since 2019, including Athens, Babylon, Carthage, Delphi, Edo, Florence, Granada, Hangzhou, Ithaca, Jakarta, Kathmandu, Lima, Mumbai, Nairobi, Oxford, Paris, Quebec, Rio, Seoul, and Tallinn.

Smart contracts on Tezos are written in Michelson, a low-level, formally verifiable language designed for security-critical contracts. Higher-level languages such as SmartPy and LIGO compile down to Michelson, giving developers a more familiar experience while preserving the formal-verification properties. The chain is widely used in NFT-focused communities, where its low fees and energy-efficient consensus made it an early home for clean-NFT culture via marketplaces such as Hic et Nunc, fxhash, and objkt.com.

Etherlink, an EVM-compatible Smart Rollup launched on mainnet in 2024, brings Solidity smart contracts and standard Ethereum tooling to the Tezos ecosystem. Etherlink saw rapid growth through 2025, with significant DeFi integrations and a steady reduction in withdrawal latency, and it is now the primary on-ramp for Ethereum developers building on Tezos.

XTZ has continuous, modest inflation through baking rewards, with current annual issuance in the range of 4 to 5 percent. There is no hard supply cap; circulating supply is roughly 1.07 to 1.08 billion XTZ as of early 2026. Tezos has also signed a series of high-profile sponsorships with Formula 1's McLaren and Red Bull Racing, Manchester United, Ubisoft, and others, often centered on NFT collaborations and brand activations.

Getting Started With Tezos

The most common ways to use XTZ are buying, holding, and delegating:

Step 1: Choose a Tezos wallet (Temple, Kukai, or Umami) and create a new account.
Step 2: Acquire XTZ on a centralized exchange such as Coinbase, Binance, or Kraken, or directly through your wallet's on-ramp.
Step 3: Withdraw XTZ to your self-custody wallet.
Step 4: Delegate your XTZ to a baker to earn staking rewards. Delegation is non-custodial: you keep control of your tokens at all times.
Step 5: Optionally bridge to Etherlink to use EVM-compatible apps with low fees and fast finality.

Tezos delegation does not lock your tokens. You can redelegate or move funds at any time, with rewards typically taking a few cycles to begin paying out.

How to Get a Tezos Wallet?

Tezos has a dedicated wallet ecosystem with several well-supported options:

Temple Wallet

Temple is the most widely used Tezos browser extension and mobile wallet, with broad support for staking, NFTs, and dApp integrations. It is often the default recommendation for new users.

Kukai Wallet

Kukai is a web-based Tezos wallet with social login options, making onboarding faster for users who do not want to manage seed phrases up front. It supports core staking and NFT functionality.

Umami Wallet

Umami is a desktop wallet maintained by Nomadic Labs, one of the core Tezos development teams. It is aimed at more technical users who want a robust, locally installed wallet.

Hardware Wallets

Ledger hardware wallets support Tezos directly, and can be paired with Temple, Kukai, or Umami for transaction signing. Hardware wallets are strongly recommended for larger long-term holdings.

Tezos Resources

How to Buy Tezos?

XTZ is widely listed on major exchanges around the world:

Centralized Exchanges

XTZ is available on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex, Gemini, OKX, Bitstamp, and most major exchanges. Fiat-to-XTZ trading pairs and crypto-to-XTZ pairs are widely available.

Decentralized Exchanges

On Tezos itself, XTZ trades on native DEXs such as QuipuSwap and Plenty. Wrapped versions also trade on EVM DEXs via bridges, though native XTZ is the canonical asset.

After purchasing, XTZ can be held, delegated to a baker for staking rewards, or used across the Tezos ecosystem and Etherlink.

Latest Tezos News

Tezos shipped a steady cadence of protocol upgrades through 2024, 2025, and into 2026. The Quebec upgrade in early 2025 cut block times to 8 seconds and refined adaptive issuance; Rio reworked the staking experience; Seoul added protocol-native multisig support; and Tallinn, the twentieth named upgrade, activated in January 2026, shipping 6-second block times alongside an Address Indexing Registry and other improvements. Etherlink, the EVM-compatible Smart Rollup, saw dramatic ecosystem growth through 2025, with TVL up several thousand percent and integrations with Morpho, Oku, and other DeFi protocols.

Looking ahead, the Tezos community is preparing for "Tezos X," a major architectural evolution that consolidates the protocol around Smart Rollups, with testnet activity expected through 2026. As with any Layer 1, XTZ's trajectory is closely tied to ecosystem activity, baker decentralization, and the pace of protocol upgrades. Following the Tezos Agora forum and the official channels listed above is the best way to stay current on governance and roadmap developments.