Pons emailed the board with a methodical summary of a situation he could only describe as “dire.” The foundation, in his view, had accomplished almost nothing since the ICO and now ran the risk that federal authorities would revoke its charter. Unless they got down to real, productive work, they would find themselves in breach of their contractual obligation to the Breitmans to complete the protocol. Foundation balance sheets for the period from July through October show inflows from crypto sales of about $65 million—and business expenses of less than a million dollars. The foundation had hired only a handful of contract employees, one of whom had sent screenshots of an empty bank account in a plea for payment. It was time, Pons wrote, to appoint an outside executive director.

Gevers argued that the stasis hadn’t been his fault. “I cannot handle all the operational tasks myself,” he wrote to the board, “and in fact it’s a waste of my time, as my skills lie in high-level leadership, vision, strategy, and evangelism. However, Arthur has rejected all my suggestions for candidates for operational roles, instead suggesting candidates that are personal friends of the Breitmans.” The latter category, in Gevers’ view, included Pons, whom he denounced as an agent of the couple, scornfully inquiring if he was on their payroll. In emails and texts, Gevers instructed the foundation’s team to stop talking to the Breitmans.

Meanwhile, the value of the foundation’s remaining crypto assets had passively doubled in value to more than $400 million. Within weeks, the entirety of the Tezos Foundation, as documents later revealed, would consist of three directors, zero employees, two HR complaints, and open hostilities with the people who owned the actual intellectual property.

On October 15, one of the Breitmans’ growing cadre of lawyers sent a 46-page letter, including exhibits, to Pons and the third board member, excluding Gevers. The document charged Gevers with “deception and self-dealing” in his attempt to award himself a “license to print money,” as well as with the Swiss crime of “disloyal management.” The Breitmans called for Gevers’ prompt removal.

Within a very short time, word of the letter and the ensuing tumult reached reporters working for the news agency Reuters, which had been investigating Tezos. On October 18, Reuters published a 3,300-word investigative report on Tezos, alleging that it was “now in danger of falling apart because of a battle for control playing out behind the scenes.” Gevers told Reuters that the letter’s censure represented nothing but “attempted character assassination. It’s a long laundry list of misleading statements and outright lies.”

For the most part, the article seemed to treat the Gevers-Breitman quarrel as a case of dishonor among thieves. After duly noting that the cryptocurrency markets had become “magnets for fraud and deception,” the Reuters journalists quoted a pre-ICO interview with Kathleen in which she described Switzerland as a place with “a regulatory authority that had a sufficient amount of oversight but not like anything too crazy.” The article noted that a PR firm representing the Breitmans had exaggerated a variety of claims about the financial institutions they had advertised as early adopters of their platform. (Kathleen showed me emails in which she expressed discomfort with the firm’s move beforehand.) In describing the terms of their contract with the Tezos Foundation, the story insinuated that, even if the Tezos tokens never amounted to anything, the Breitmans would still walk away with tens of millions of dollars.

But the parts of the Reuters article that would ultimately cause the Breitmans the greatest tribulation were the ones that all but openly identified the Tezos ICO as a sale of unregistered securities. The article quoted a handful of Tezos token purchasers who frankly admitted they were only in it for speculative gain. “For me and for a lot of people this is an investment. We are looking for a return,” a cryptocurrency trader named Kevin Zhou told Reuters; he added that he “didn’t really care about using the Tezos technology.” Kathleen had on her end been intermittently nonchalant in the way she described the fund-raiser in public. She’d been unable to help talking about the “sale” of tokens, and when she was careful to talk instead about “donations” she could sound glib: She once referred to their tokens as akin to the “tote bag” one might receive as a thank-you gift from NPR.

By the winter, the Tezos Foundation consisted of three directors, zero employees, two HR complaints, and open hostilities with the Breitmans.

The Breitmans would not comment on the securities question, but these statements were all the more problematic in the context of a recent SEC memorandum on the DAO; its upshot was that anybody who wanted to sell tokens was on notice to proceed with extreme caution. The DAO’s tokens, the commission wrote, had clearly qualified as securities, and ill-disguised ones at that. The same might be true for everything coming out of Switzerland, “depending on the facts and circumstances of each individual ICO.” Optimistic observers took this to mean that the SEC would ultimately permit the unregulated sale of so-called utility tokens—those that, like a digital Deli Dollar, actually did something. Ethereum, for instance, had grown from a founding group’s project to a diffuse, participatory network, and its token had evolved from a passive investment to an item people were using to animate utility-­management systems, censorship-proof media startups, and music-distribution services. Tezos saw its destiny in the same arc, and the network, if it ever launched, would presumably prove it. Any token purchase was in some sense speculative, but in the utopian rather than the rapacious sense of the word. Idealistic token buyers speculated that their contributions represented a down payment on a new world of unfettered interpersonal exchange, one free at last from banks and other rentiers.