Proof of Progress: Arthur Breitman on What Tezos Got Right

Arthur Breitman has been in crypto since 2011, which most people would consider a long time. He wrote the Tezos white paper in 2014, almost 12 years later, making him one of the few founders whose decade-old predictions still hold up. Two of the white paper's three arguments, he told Block Insider, have won outright. One was half right. And the thing he did not write about at all is what Tezos has spent the last four years building.

"I'm going to toot my own horn and say, 'Look, everything we got right,'" Breitman said. "But it got some things wrong, and one of the things it got wrong was the importance of scalability, scaling, and throughput, which is barely discussed in the Tezos position paper."

That admission frames where Tezos is in 2026: a chain approaching ten years live, with a new execution layer to fix the blind spot, a tokenization product that deliberately avoids Treasuries, and a hard deadline to replace every signature scheme it runs before quantum computers arrive.

The Three Pillars, Graded

The 2014 paper made three cases. Breitman went through each.

Governance: The argument was that a chain needs a formal, on-chain process to upgrade itself without a central decision-maker. "A lot of chains have made a solution of not having really decentralized governance, of having kind of ad-hoc governance," he said.

Bitcoin maxis’ voices pushed the idea that nobody should be able to steer the chain. "I think that's a valid point of view. However, that means you need formal governance; it doesn't mean that you should sacrifice the ability to evolve." He calls this pillar vindicated, "but less so than the other two," and points to quantum computing as the reason upgradability now matters: "The need to upgrade is becoming very, very pressing."

Proof of stake: In 2014, the educated view was that proof of stake could not work. "You had academic papers written about it, written about the fact that it would be more expensive than proof of work and all of these things, and of course it was nonsense," Breitman said. "By and large, proof of stake has won. That's, I would say, a total victory."

Formal verification: The paper argued that people would keep large sums in small pieces of code, bugs would be catastrophic, and so contracts would need mathematical proof of correctness. The first two parts came true. The third did not, and Breitman has a theory about why. "If you tell those people, 'Well, there's a 99% chance you're going to lose everything and a 1% chance you get 100x,' and then you tell them, 'Well, there's an extra 1 in 1,000 chance that all the money goes away because of a bug,' maybe they don't care that much."

What changed is cost. "We now live in an age where formal verification is essentially free," he said. AI models have turned a tedious manual task into something cheap, and he argues that makes Michelson, the Tezos contract language designed for verifiability, more useful rather than less. "Your proofs get easier. There's even more value now that you can prove really complex statements about the behavior of your smart contract."

Tezos X: Fixing the Blind Spot

Breitman says he came to throughput late.

"I thought mostly that people wanted access to hold as opposed to doing tons and tons of transactions on the chain. But clearly, after 2021, we saw the demand for a lot of transaction throughput."

The answer is Tezos X, described as "a very high-throughput, extremely low-latency layer built on top of Tezos" that inherits the base chain's security. The branding is still catching up with the engineering. What shipped first was Etherlink, an EVM-compatible Layer 2. That has now been extended to support all of Tezos's own primitives, so Michelson and EVM code run in the same environment. "We still don't call it Tezos X, I think it's a branding thing," Breitman said. "At some point, once it's stable enough, we'll feel like, 'Okay, now this is officially Tezos X.'"

On volume, he gave a range rather than a headline number: 200,000 to 600,000 transactions a day across Tezos and Tezos X combined. "It's modest in absolute terms if you think about it, but among blockchains, it's actually holding its own."

Early applications are mostly DeFi. He named Hanu, an order-book DEX on Etherlink that shares liquidity across chains through vaults, as "very innovative and performant." He also pointed to the Tezos art community, now more than five years old and "still very active."

Why Uranium Before Treasuries

Most tokenization on other chains has gone after money-market funds, Treasuries and, more recently, equities. Breitman's explanation for that is unflattering to the strategy, if not to the people running it.

"Why do you need tokenized Nvidia?" he asked. Either you are in a country without easy brokerage access, "but then wouldn't you prefer a more diversified fund?", or you are a crypto-native trader who wants a familiar product on familiar rails. "You're taking an existing distribution channel in the crypto space and bringing them products that they usually don't access through crypto rails." The same logic covers tokenized Treasuries: "I want to go flat, but I don't want to go off-chain."

Tezos went the other way. Metals.io, launched about eighteen months ago, offers tokenized uranium, nickel and cobalt, with the stated goal of covering the periodic table. "Instead of trying to bring an existing product to people who didn't have access to it, we brought a product that no one had access to," Breitman said. "There is no other product like this for uranium, and it was possible to do because it was on Tezos."

He argues for why crypto traders, who mostly want volatility, should care about a spot commodity market. Perpetual futures need someone on the other side holding spot. "That's also why the lack of this spot market in uranium is why you see the CME, a major futures exchange, have no volume in their uranium futures. You need a spot market, and I think we can deliver that."

Bringing products like Metals.io directly under the Tezos Foundation is now a stated priority. "Products like Metals.io are a good example of this," he said of the foundation's shift toward direct product development.

The Post-Quantum Deadline

Tezos already runs a quantum testnet that anyone can join. "A lot, if not most, of the development work has been done," Breitman said. "We have a prototype that works." What remains is governance: the changes must be proposed and voted on by bakers, and he does not want to rush a system with a decade of uptime. "I think we will be fully post-quantum by the end of 2027."

He was precise about the current state when the interviewer called Tezos quantum-ready. "At the moment we're not quantum ready, but we will be. At the moment, we're very quantum conscious."

Breitman splits the problem in two. The protocol layer, from randomness functions to the pairing signatures used in staking, is "a hard technical challenge, but it's not a hard social challenge." Chains will get to it, even if they "cram the night before." The harder part is users. "You cannot coordinate millions of people having their keys who have their own lives, are busy, and aren't necessarily technologists following the chain every day."

That is the risk he sees for Bitcoin. He is confident it will upgrade when forced to. "But if they do it very late, that's a problem, because it doesn't give time to everyone in the world who has a Bitcoin address to upgrade. It takes years for people to migrate."

What Breitman Is Watching

Asked what comes after stablecoins and tokenization as the industry's narrative, Breitman picked revenue. He traced its first version to Ethereum in 2021, when fees spiked and the network briefly burned more ETH than it issued, and explained why he never believed in it as a long-term thesis.

"In a world where scaling works, unless you can scale massively, the demand for transactions, the clearing price for transactions, is going to go down, and the clearing price times the volume is also going to go down."

Projects are now hunting for other ways to return value to token holders, and he thinks the narrative "actually has legs" now that US regulators have stopped treating any such mechanism as a securities violation.

His one-year view is deliberately unexciting. "There's a decline around 'crypto for crypto's sake,'" he said. "We'll see more RWAs, and we'll see more of these real-world applications. I think people will be a bit disappointed because they won't necessarily be as big as people had dreamed, but they'll be there."

Asked why anyone should pick Tezos in a market of thousands of chains, his answer was one word, then an explanation. "Resilience. Tezos has a great security record in terms of being live and securing funds for almost 10 years. It has a great record of upgrades." He listed what Tezos did first: proof of stake, data availability layers, rollups with real fraud proofs at a time when every Ethereum rollup had admin keys. "I think we're going to be at the forefront of post-quantum. It's not a flash; it's not in fashion."