At Kalhatti our goal is to create frictionless access to global financial assets. Critical to making it happen is the blockchain choice for us. Our initial plans were to build on top of Ethereum, but we eventually chose to go with Tezos.

I have been dabbling with Ethereum for the last 2-3 years when the meet-ups had 10–12 folks with Vitalik and Gavin busy hacking away at the C++ node. Together with the traction Ethereum was getting, it seemed like the natural choice for us. But as we started to play around with Tezos the last 2–3 months, it felt like time to reconsider based on the following key reasons:

Durability

Security

Protocol feature vs. Feature ICOs

Durability

While I understood the importance of governance, I never really appreciated it until forks started becoming a norm. Given the open nature of development, in the absence of a spiritual leader it is easy for sub-groups to get formed with strong philosophical differences and opinions (block size, segwit2x). Thus, making it hard to get social consensus around the platform roadmap. Opinions get entrenched and forks seem to be the solution.

This seems less critical when the groups are smaller and issues are more basic. Some of you might remember the bitcoin fork in 2013 — what was meant to be an immutable ledger as the single source of truth started splitting into two sources of truth. It was fascinating to see how core-dev quickly got together, reached consensus, and were able to put a fix out soon. Equally amazing was how they convinced everyone including miners to adopt the fix. Arvind Narayanan beautifully reconstructed how the events unfolded in his blog.

It was not just in Bitcoin; we saw similar differences in opinion within the Ethereum community around the fork after the DAO hack. Part of the community believed it violated the core tenet of immutability, which it did but the broader community believed that despite it the move was important to save the fledgling ecosystem. I was definitely in the latter group.

What happens if the spiritual leader for whatever reason wasn’t able to lead the flock ? How does the platform evolve without creating multiple forks at each decision point? I like that Tezos has a built in way to evolve the platform that takes into consideration the broader set of stakeholders around it. The self-amendment feature provides a way to gracefully evolve the platform adding to its durability.

Security

There is definitely a ‘Security First’ mindset in the ethos behind Michelson, the smart contract language for Tezos. At the end of the day the security is only as good as the person implementing it. But language often shapes how a person thinks and by providing right constructs around it, forces the developers to be more cognizant of it. Michelson is statically typed and functional and together with the ability for formal verification definitely adds to the security.

In general ,you can feel the emphasis of security across all aspects of the Tezos platform. Having said that, there is a strong ramp up to write smart contracts as everything is not that well documented. One might need to know a little bit of OCaml to reverse engineer some of the calls/apis. But these are the early days.

Protocol feature vs. ICOs

It feels like a good number of features are being ICOed away in Ethereum. If I am doing app development that calls various decentralized services I almost need as many tokens even if I can shape-shift it away.

There is something about the philosophy that some features (especially the second-layer infrastructure) should just be baked into the platform as opposed to be a stand-alone ICO feature. I think this might be what Vitalik was alluding to in his tweet. A similar theme seems to be echoing within the community too.

The Tezos approach of adding features by doing protocol amendments and developers being rewarded if the amendment is accepted seems to be a better approach. This preserves the integrity of the platform while providing enough incentives for developers to enrich the platform.

The Crisis

The recent news of the divide between a specific member of the Tezos foundation and the rest of the team had us doubt the choice we made. But we decided to go back to the 1st principles of what made us choose it.

- A durable, and secure blockchain platform with a philosophical direction that is aligned with ours

- Arthur and the rest of Tezos team that can make it happen

Most ICOs have used the foundation route. In this case, I believe given the unexpected massive raise the incentives might have skewed. I feel Tezos has the right team to navigate through the crises and take the community forward.

All the major platforms and startups have gone through initial hiccups and defining moments. It is not these moments that define the startups but rather how the teams can navigate through this and emerge stronger at the other side.

My effort is not to detract from any other platform. I am a big believer in Ethereum and feel each of the other platforms have their own niche . It is not a zero sum game. To each team their own choice based on what features matters most (e.g - Ripple : positioned as the inter-bank settlement layer, HyperLedger : IBM / other big consulting firms pushing this for private blockchains PoCs within larger companies, R3 : most likely inter-bank trade settlement in the IB domain ??? , qtum : focused more on specific geographies with regulatory controls, …)

Competition is good… and with it comes choice.

For us at Kalhatti we are staking our future (no pun intended wrt proof of stake) on Tezos.