Shortly after the Tezos ICO fundraiser in 2017, media and news reports on the project quickly went south, and they still haven’t recovered. Most of the reporting, even reporting done by “crypto journalists,” is lacking in context and detail when it comes to discussing the nature of the Tezos platform and the issues with the Tezos Foundation in late 2017 and early 2018. Most of the reporting focuses on community unrest, or pent-up frustration, which is somewhat valid to an extent. What it never focuses on is the technology, or the new governance model, or, perhaps most intriguing of all, the concept of passive income coming from your Tezos baker while it quietly validates transactions on the network.

Take these three articles and you’ll start to understand what I mean. The crypto press has been churning out stories since the Betanet launch, most of which get the facts wrong or simply leave the wrong impression about the project.

1) Coindesk: “Tezos Investors Got a Chance to Sell This Week – And They Took It” (link)

The headline alone implies that contributors have been waiting to dump the project. Sure, some of them did, it’s understandable having capital locked up for a year that some holders needed to liquidate.

After waiting nearly a year to get their tokens, the first thing many Tezos investors did was get rid of them. At least, that seems to be the case according to available market data, which indicates a wave of selling has taken place since the tech backing the crypto asset was released in beta. All in all, prices fell 34 percent on Monday to $2.00, according to CoinMarketCap. From a Monday high above $4, the price dropped 74 percent to a Friday low of $1.10, before paring losses to reach roughly $1.76 as of press time. Notably, the sell-off coincided with the first listing of Tezos tokens on an exchange, meaning investors were quick to take advantage of access to liquidity.

Did the reporter at Coindesk bother to check on what percentage of tokens had actually been activated on the Betanet? The amount is only about one-quarter of the supply. According to some basic analysis, it appears that the majority of Tezos holders are just that – holders. There will always be some dumping a coin for a profit, that’s basic crypto flipping. But there is a far larger number of wallets that are holding their coins and baking their coins, as per the intent of the entire project.

2) AMB Crypto: “Tezos [XTZ] amidst all controversies now ranks at 19th – What is happening?” (link)

This story, from AMB Crypto, sort of praises Tezos’ jump to #19 on CoinMarketCap, but leaves much to be desired about why it would land in the top twenty so quickly after launch. The fact that the author actually asked “what is happening” in the title must tell you that it’s someone who has not followed the project other than reading other bad articles about Tezos. This article dwells on the lawsuits and controversy, once again ignoring the technology other than a generic blurb that floats right by most casual readers.

There are a lot of controversies surrounding Tezos. Last year Tezos raised $232 million with an Initial Coin Offering [ICO]. Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, a couple who established this project, raised over 10x more than what they had estimated. Later, the couple faced four class action lawsuits. Tezos also has been the subject of scrutiny and multiple lawsuits concerning compliance with US Securities Exchange Commission SEC regulations. The lawsuit claimed that Tazos tokens should be considered secure under US law. They would have to be registered with the SEC to be legally sold to US investors. They also faced a lot of internal governance issues.

They have a misspelling of “Tazos” in there as well, so this is the type of quality we’re getting from your average crypto news site that literally pops up first on Google News when you type in “tezos.” Yes, there were some frivolous lawsuits, and organisational issues, but that’s old news, very old news. A little further reading or even glancing over the Tezos reddit forum would have provided more background on what was really happening the past four months with the project.

3) NewsBTC: “Cryptocurrency Market Update: Tezos Announces its Arrival, Surges 35%” (link)

This story is the most positive of the bunch, and kudos to NewsBTC for including Arthur’s latest development update directly in their story. Doesn’t take a journalism degree to give the reader more information and more details into the project.

According to Coinmarketcap Tezos is up 35% on the day trading at $1.73 from $1.16 this time yesterday. Over the week the trade price has plunged over 60% from $4.4 this time last weekend and larger losses have occurred over the past month. Against Bitcoin XTZ has climbed 32% on the day to 26000 satoshis from 18000 sats this time yesterday. On the week though Tezos has lost 62% against Bitcoin falling from 70000 satoshis this time last Saturday. As a result Tezos screamed into the top 25 on June 5 with a market cap of $1.2 billion. Since then it has fallen back to just over $1 billion which ranks it at 19th. Tezos is only traded on Gate.io and HitBTC which is quite remarkable given its progress since launch. There are 763 million XTZ supplied with 607 million circulating. Trade volume has declined over the past 24 hours from $13 million to just below $10 million.

NewsBTC focuses on the exchange price, but they at least go deeper and credit the surge in pricing to the nature of the technology and the release of Arthur’s development video a couple days ago.

Watching the stories and misreporting on Tezos over the past year is part what motivated me to launch Tezos News and begin covering the project myself. Spending hours each day reading reddit, reading the Tezos Gitlab log, and lurking in Riot, you actually get a sense of what is happening and the real groundbreaking technology Tezos is built on.

I am waiting for the day when Coindesk, among others, begins to extol the benefits of Tezos baking and casual readers start to understand how their participation in the network can earn them tokens. Participation that does not require $20k in video cards to mine a fraction of a proof-of-work coin, but participation that actually runs the network and pays out a decent yield. Then we will see wider adoption and wide appeal to more crypto investors who will want to learn more about this brand spanking new blockchain built on new technology.

Part of the battle is simply informing readers that Tezos is NOT another junk ERC20 token acting as a front for some flailing project. Tezos is, in fact, a fully functional unique blockchain unlike anything else available in the crypto space today.

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