Down Not Out: Revived Tezos Team Predicts Mega-ICO Will Launch In 2018

Tezos, the blockchain project backed by the largest ever initial coin offering at the time of its 2017 launch, hasn't exactly been able to translate its hype into success as yet.

"Nice to be back to business," venture capitalist Timothy Draper, a financial backer of the Tezos protocol, told CoinDesk in an email.

To recap, the story begins when Dynamic Ledger Solutions proposed a totally new blockchain called Tezos that would use proof-of-stake to confirm blocks and could amend itself over time, as technology changed.

The funds were controlled by the Tezos Foundation, which soon proved unwilling to spend the funds on developing the protocol.

At the beginning of February, a group of activist Tezos investors set up an alternate legal entity called T2 in case DLS decided to launch the protocol under a different legal entity.

"Through the adversity, we've grown and we've strengthened," Ryan Jesperson, the new president of the Tezos Foundation board, told CoinDesk in his first interview taking a seat on the board.

The new board chair declined to detail what gave his team the leverage to assert control over the organization controlling the pre-sale of Tezos tokens, saying that he "Generally wants to be forward focusing as much as possible and not rehash the past."

In the last week the foundation finished incorporating Tezos AG, an operational entity "That will provide basic administration and general management functions," he said.

Jesperson will have a role at both Tezos AG and the foundation.

Its purpose was to give Tezos a safe legal entity to launch under if needed, but that's no longer necessary.