Tezos, the public blockchain suited to business applications

It is the level of decentralization of a public blockchain that guarantees its reliability, unlike a PKI infrastructure or a private blockchain that is controlled by a centralized organization. Indeed, on a highly decentralized public blockchain, hundreds or even thousands of nodes produce and validate blocks without interruption and store the state of the blockchain in an unalterable and permanent way, thus preventing risks of fraud, attacks or service interruption. A public blockchain also provides the transparency increasingly sought by users who are more and more defiant of centralized control organizations.

The concept of blockchain emerged in 2008 and the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain was produced in 2009. In 2014, the creation of the Ethereum blockchain together with the introduction of smart contracts and decentralized applications represented a major turning point as it allowed to consider uses of blockchain other than cryptocurrencies. It was at this point that financial institutions and the industry really started to take an interest in blockchain applications, which have continued to grow ever since.

Today, there are still very few electronic signature solutions based on blockchain technology. Most of them are based on the public blockchains Bitcoin or Ethereum or on private blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric.

If Bitcoin and Ethereum are among the most secure and universal blockchains due to their size and level of decentralization, they have major drawbacks that limit their application for electronic signature. Bitcoin is based on a proof-of-work consensus which establishes that to produce a new block, a node must be the first to solve a complex mathematical problem. This results in a particularly high cost and time for processing transactions and excessive energy consumption. Unlike proof-of-work, Tezos implements a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism which is much more energy-efficient as it involves selecting a validator based on the amount of cryptocurrency it puts into play. Regarding network speed, Tezos currently processes up to 1,000 transactions per second (TPS). Upcoming developments should allow to reach the million TPS range and thus meet the growing market demand. In comparison, Bitcoin processes up to 7 TPS and Ethereum up to 100 TPS. All this essentially explains why electronic signature solutions based on Bitcoin or Ethereum are very limited today.

Tezos has a self-amending mechanism associated with an explicit on-chain governance.

Any developer can propose an evolution that will be submitted to the vote of the blockchain participants and that will go through an acceptance process in several phases, each lasting a given number of cycles. All participants can express their votes in proportion to the amount of Tez they hold.

A new version of the protocol will be released every 2 to 3 months.

The self-evolution of Tezos is one of its most outstanding and significant assets because it prevents the risk of hard forks as it has been the case in the past for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It also ensures that the blockchain will be able to continuously integrate new innovations while preserving the stability of the existing network. This self-evolution is a real guarantee of stability for users of the blockchain and explains in large part why more and more institutional, industrial and financial players are choosing Tezos.