Tezos: The Innovation Hub
Tezos is an innovation hub.
Copying someone else’s system, Ethereum, means no innovation — nothing new is born in such a manner. Almost all other smart contract chains are simply carbon copies of Ethereum: I believe the market is greatly mis-pricing them. Why?
Well, I think Silicon Valley crypto VC’s decided about 1.5 years ago that for a smart contract platform to thrive and survive that it needs to be EVM compatible, that is it needs to use the EVM and use Solidity.
Ok fine, this makes sense. Ethereum is the dominant force in the crypto world. It attracts the vast majority of developers and liquidity. So the thinking became that to survive a smart contract platform must hook into Ethereum.
That is all fine and dandy and is filled with good intentions. But what seems to have happened in practice is that these chains that have “hooked-in” are pretty much just copy-pasting. So we have an environment of non-innovation and stagnation, a reactive environment of, “What is Ethereum doing? How fast can we copy paste it?”
No forward thinking. No visionaries except for the occasional fake crypto-messiah.
Almost all innovation in the smart contracts platform space is happening on Tezos and Ethereum.
Wait Tezos? Tezos! I thought Tezos was a pointless ghost-chain? I thought Tezos was a scam?
No friend that is what the crypto establishment wants you to think because Tezos is the one viable threat in the smart contract space, viable because it is taking the time to think and act differently, not just talk about it mind you, but do it, and do it quickly!
So if there are a bunch of smart contract platforms but they are all just copy pasting Ethereum, how was Tezos able to foster an atmosphere of innovation?
By becoming an island. Seriously. They did it by becoming an island. Think about it. If you were trying to write a novel do you think you would have a better chance of creating something new and interesting if you were alone on a desert island (with enough easily accessible food so you’d be well fed and have time to write!) or if you were sitting next to Charles Dickens looking over his shoulder and copying his words. You can’t think with Charles right there. All these supposed smart contract chains are sitting next to Charles Dickens (Ethereum) and they are copying his words and then they are holding up their book and saying, “Check it out. I wrote Oliver Fist. Look at Oliver Fist. Oliver Fist is an amazing book guys!!” Meanwhile, Tezos with its big brained engineers is sitting alone on an island, contemplating deeply and producing from a creative first principles standpoint.
No Tezos does not use the EVM. No Tezos will not copy paste your solidity smart contracts. Tezos will do everything from the ground up its own way. (Even going so far as, ok you use Github, then Tezos will use Gitlab.)
So from a Silicon Valley VC perspective this looks like a big mistake. But this decision to take the hard path, to not copy paste to kingdom come has bred within Tezos the can-do attitude of the cowbow, of the maverick, of the innovator. Tezos is a first principles thinker. And this has already delivered big results in terms of innovation on Tezos.
On-chain governance is taken for granted now as a potentially very good idea for a smart contract platform (there is still debate) and it was Tezos that first pushed this forward in 2015. From that moment Tezos defined itself as a blockchain that was not going to follow the herd, as a blockchain that was willing to change and adapt.
From the moment it was a kernel of an idea, Tezos has demonstrated an environment of continuous innovation. Innovation is baked into the bones of Tezos because it was founded on the idea of using a nomic game as the basis for a blockchain — a game which can change the rules of the game, which simply put is innovation at the core.
Liquid POS, private smart contracts, collateralized staking, liquidity baking. These are things that you don’t see other places bc they are not innovating they are just copy pasting. Also the easy ability to use formal verification — that is another Tezos innovation. Tezos will continue to innovate rapidly due to their system of non-forking upgrades (almost forgot another Tezos innovation: forkless updates) every 3 months. Even the non-managerial TF is an innovation in the blockchain space. Using a readable Michelson system as the base of a blockchain rather than a very difficult to understand EVM as the base is an innovation. There are many other technical innovations such as how Tezos handles memory and smart contract security and so on. Anything that the Tezos blockchain touches is an opportunity to innovate. Compare that to a copy paste Ethereum blockchain and the difference is stark and almost endless.
Okay if all this is true then why isn’t Tezos in the market cap top 10?
I would answer: first, crypto-markets are not exactly known for being rational. Market cap is not proof that any chain is superior to any other chain. I think most would agree that Ripple is rather pointless — yet there it stands, a thumb in the face to all those who would prefer rationality. A point further explained by Vitalik in this essay: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html that sometimes the market is not efficient. That sometimes the intelligent doubt themselves while those with less reason to be confident plow headlong forward.
Second, I think it has to do with what I was talking about before: VC’s wanted to see quick compatibility with the EVM and solidity. And when they saw that Tezos did not have it they decided to shun it.
But I think that was a huge mistake.
VC: Why?
Because these other chains are not innovating. They bring nothing useful to the table.
VC: But they can do 1 trillion transactions per second!
But they have sacrificed decentralization, and at the end of the day that is what this is about. These systems need to be censorship resistant and capable of living on their own. Also, the extra capacity they have figured out how to conjure up through decreased decentralization is pointless in the face of Ethereum sharding and layer 2 solutions.
That leaves Tezos as the one viable competitor because Tezos is innovating on everything that it touches and not just copy pasting what is happening on Ethereum.
So the one exception to the above is Cardano: they are creating something new. (Cardano which pivoted from a blockchain video game around the time that Tezos was announced 2015, pivoting into something very similiar to Tezos — and most would say not pivoting but rather mimicking Tezos. Yes that Cardano. Run by Charles Hoskinson who was fired one year into his work with Ethereum. Yes that Cardano.) But Cardano has of yet produced nothing. They are literally years behind Tezos. Let that sink in: years. And yes if anyone else wants to create a novel smart contract platform from the ground up like Tezos has done it will take years. Tezos is years ahead in terms of a viable competitor to Ethereum and the gulf widens with each day.
Tezos innovates daily and it innovates on a 3 month upgrade schedule. Every 3 months Tezos has a forkless upgrade. Tezos is already technically superior to all the 1 trillion per second Ethereum copy paste chains, but as time goes on the distance will increase more and more because innovation is all — and Tezos is the innovation hub.
Disclosure: Long Tez, Long Eth and Eth tokens. Not financial advice.
