On Thursday (August 8), Coinbase announced that it now supports Tezos (XTZ) on Coinbase Consumer (coinbase.com) and in the Coinbase mobile app for iOS and Android.

What is Tezos?

The Tezos white paper says that Tezos is “a generic and self-amending crypto-ledger,” and that “Tezos can instantiate any blockchain based ledger.” 

Here is some of what Binance Info has to say about Tezos:

  • “Tezos completed one of the largest ICOs of 2017 raising almost $232m in one day.”
  • “The consensus algorithm on Tezos is Delegated Proof of Stake (dPoS) which will help with the governance structure of the blockchain.”
  • “The decentralised governance of the Tezos blockchain will allow anybody to propose protocol upgrades.”

Coinbase and Tezos

On July 30, Coinbase announced that on August 5 Tezos (XTZ) would get listed on Coinbase Pro (pro.coinbase.com), its platform for professional/experienced traders/investors. It also mentioned that XTZ would initially be supported in all jurisdictions where Coinbase is available, but not in the state of New York. 

It is also worth rembering that on March 29, Coinbase Custody announced that it was launching staking support for Tezos. 

Today’s announcement, which came around 17:20 UTC, seems to have helped the XTZ price.

As you can see in the price chart below (from CryptoCompare), the price started rising just after the announcement, and at press time (29:34 UTC), XTZ-USD is trading at $1.564, up 13.75% in the past 24-hour period:

XTZ-USD 24 Hour Chart - 8 August 2019.png

A few minutes after today’s announcement, Coinbase’s Head of Listings, Zach Segal, took to Twitter to provide a basic overview of Tezos via a series of tweets.

One of the most interesting features of Tezos is “self-amendment”:

Here is how the Tezos website summarizes the benefits of this feature:

Self-amendment allows Tezos to upgrade itself without having to split ('fork') the network into two different blockchains. This is important as the suggestion or expectation of a fork can divide the community, alter stakeholder incentives, and disrupt the network effects that are formed over time. Because of self-amendment, coordination and execution costs for protocol upgrades are reduced and future innovations can be seamlessly implemented.

Tezos Support Coming to Truffle Suite

On August 2, the Tezos Foundation said that it had “issued a grant to the team behind Truffle Suite, a world class development environment, to help developers more easily build on Tezos.”

Truffle Suite describes itself as “sweet tools for smart contracts”. It is “one of the most popular sets of developer tools in the Ethereum ecosystem based on GitHub stars.” 

This collaboration will “broaden Truffle’s scope by integrating Truffle tools with Tezos protocols and languages,” and will “make developing Tezos applications easier by lowering the barrier to entry and providing Tezos developers with a set of industry-leading tools in one accessible location.”

Finally, the Tezos Foundation points out that although “Truffle currently supports multiple high-level languages, Tezos is the first public, non-EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) smart contract platform to be supported in its suite of tools.”