Kathleen Breitman: Tezos Will “Go Rogue” and Launch Soon

Tezos investors wondering when the beleaguered project will see the light of day have finally received news. At UCLA Blockchain Lab’s Cyber Days conference on Sunday, Kathleen Breitman promised to “go rogue” and press ahead with the platform launch. If the Tezos co-founder has her way, “tezzies” tokens will be available in a matter of weeks.

Also read: Tezos Swiss Foundation Concept is “Old, Inflexible and Stupid”

Tezos Founders Plot a Jail Break

The Tezos story is a tangled one involving lawsuits, broken promises, in-fighting and something about a “tote bag”. The long and short of it is that one of last year’s biggest ICOs has been hopelessly delayed, while the Tezos Foundation’s president has been accused of running a dictatorship. The affair has been a deeply embarrassing one for Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, who had been hailed as exemplary entrepreneurs after raising $232 million. Like their investors, they’re eager to get the project off the ground and put the bad times behind them.

At a UCLA conference on Sunday, Kathleen Breitman boldly declared:

We plan on releasing the token and going rogue in the next few weeks. We’re able to release the token on our own terms. For awhile I felt like I was being ‘gaslit,’ but then I unburdened myself of the morality of it. Things needed to move forward. It’s unfair, but we need to ship the code.

Pre-launch XTZ futures tokens on Hitbtc rose by 6% off the news. At $2.92 though, tezzies are still down substantially from their December peak of $10.51. Tezos now looks set to become the first crypto project to have forked before its launch. The rift is evident on Twitter, where there’s a choice between the Tezos account (which has been silent since September), the Tezos Foundation account, whose president is the polarizing Johann Gevers, and then the Breitmans’ T2 Foundation, which is “committed to making sure that the @tez0s network has an adequate, safe, and timely place to launch.”

There’s just one major problem standing in their way: the Tezos Foundation has control of all the funds and the XTZ tokens. Coupled with the pending lawsuits that both the Foundation and the Breitmans are facing, and it’s obvious the whole affair is a hideous mess. Before the governance-focused blockchain project can launch, Tezos’ founders have a few loose ends to tidy up.

Do you think the Breitmans are finally close to launching Tezos? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Steph Vaughan.

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