Delays Be Damned: Tezos Blockchain Enters Beta

After months of painful wrangling, the Tezos network is up and running - more or less.

The Tezos Foundation announced on Saturday that the blockchain's "Betanet is live." As the group explained prior to the launch, this means that a fully functional version of the network is available, but still "Experimental" in nature, with downtime and even emergency hard forks of the network possible.

The Tezos Foundation proposed a first or "Genesis" block for the blockchain, the details of which are available here.

Dynamic Ledger Solutions, the company that has been in control the code behind the Tezos protocol, has promised to release it as open source software under the MIT license, but the project's GitHub page has not been updated to reflect a new license agreement at the time of writing.

The Tezos Foundation sold $232 million worth of ethereum-based XTZ tokens to the public in a July 2017 ICO. With the launch of the betanet, those tokens are migrating to the freestanding Tezos blockchain.

The delay between the the ICO and the platform's launch is largely due to a conflict that pitted Tezos' founders, Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, against Johann Gevers, former president of the Tezos Foundation.

The Breitmans, Dynamic Ledger Solutions, the Tezos Foundation and others associated with the project have been sued at least four times between them.

At least two groups of developers have announced plans to create alternate versions of Tezos and to dispense with aspects of the platform they don't like, such as KYC and awards of pre-mined tokens to the foundation.

TzLibre announced the day after Gevers stepped down that it would launch its own version of the Tezos protocol.

Another project, nTezos, emerged in response to the Tezos Foundation's KYC announcement.