Tezos uses an on-chain governance model that enables the protocol to be amended when upgrade proposals receive a favorable vote from the community.

[4] While working at Morgan Stanley in 2014, Arthur Breitman released two papers that proposed a new type of blockchain under the pseudonym "L. M. Goodman," referencing a journalist at Newsweek who had misidentified the creator of Bitcoin.

[5] In 2015, intending to develop Tezos, Arthur Breitman registered a company called Dynamic Ledger Solutions, Inc. (DLS) in Delaware, with himself as chief executive.

[4] They received a $1.5 million investment from Tim Draper and hired public relations firm Strange Brew to promote their project.

[5][10][11] The contributions were termed "non-refundable donations", which Kathleen Breitman likened to a pledge drive where people would receive tote bags, though some participants considered them an investment.

[17] The disagreements led to delays in the deployment of Tezos, which caused investors to bring lawsuits alleging fraud during the fundraiser and unauthorized sales of securities.

[21] The primary protocol of Tezos utilizes liquid proof of stake (LPoS) and supports Turing-complete smart contracts in a domain-specific language called Michelson.

Michelson is a purely functional stack-based language with a reduced instruction set and no side effects, designed with formal verification in mind.

[22] The Tezos protocol allows itself to be amended by a staged process performed by committing operations to the stored blockchain to submit proposals (intended code changes) and to vote on those changes.