Tezos Foundation FAQ

The Tezos Foundation (TF) sustainably deploys resources and acts as treasurer of the Foundation’s assets with the goal of supporting the long-term success of Tezos. The Tezos Foundation supports the Tezos protocol, the development of technical infrastructure on Tezos as well as Tezos adoption through grants and other capital deployment to independently managed entities, teams and projects around the world. However, the TF is neither the “head office of Tezos” nor does TF itself build technology. The Tezos Foundation is a Swiss foundation, supervised by the Swiss Federal Foundation Supervisory Authority.

The day-to-day team at the Tezos Foundation includes nearly 20 staff members split between finance, IT and security, operations, and legal. These numbers include the Executive Committee. This team is responsible for executing the vision laid out by the Tezos Foundation Council. The Council currently engages 9 Council members, with the Chair being operational ad interim.

The main purposes of the Tezos Foundation are to allocate funding to various independently operating entities in the Tezos ecosystem, as well as to manage its own treasury. The Council (also sometimes referred to as “Board”) Members don’t have a day-to-day operational role (with the exception of the Chair ad interim) at the Foundation but define the funding and asset-management strategy of the Foundation including its organisation, and mandate the operations team to put this strategy in place and supervise the progress and ultimately control the funding allocation. As such, the Foundation Council is the ultimate responsible body at the Tezos Foundation. Council members have been selected from various industry backgrounds in order to accomplish the Foundation’s mission.

According to the Foundation Charter and in line with Swiss foundation law, the Foundation Council is responsible for electing its new members. Since the beginning of this year, the operational process for recruiting new Council and executive team members is delegated to the Nomination and Remuneration Committee of the Foundation, which makes initial suggestions of candidates based on criteria defined by the Council. Sourcing of candidates is supported by an international recruitment agency and candidates, on a case by case basis, are vetted by various external sources lice including key people within the Tezos ecosystem. As a general guideline, Council members, including the Council Chairperson, should be accomplished individuals with a solid professional track record in industries relevant to the Tezos ecosystem. In addition they should be financially independent and in the position to take an unbiased view on the Foundation and the Tezos ecosystem. The Executive Committee is elected by the Foundation Council, also as defined in the Foundation Charter. More information on the Foundation committees can be found here.

The remuneration of Council members is allowed by Swiss law and proportional to responsibilities and workload. Institutional partners, the Foundation’s independent external auditor (PwC Switzerland), and the Swiss Federal Foundation Supervisory Authority have never raised concerns about the Council’s compensation. As such, and in line with our general views regarding personal privacy, we will not disclose Council remuneration.

There’s no plan for the Tezos Foundation’s bakers to stop baking at this time. We’re considering options involving delegation, but this is currently not a priority. 

The Tezos protocol requires active participation of tez holders, and penalizes inactivity. As a large holder of tez and a member of the Tezos community, the Tezos Foundation runs its own bakers.

The Foundation sometimes allocates tez to long-term contributors to the ecosystem to reward for active and successful participation (i.e. as part of grant or sponsorships). Further tez loans are used to foster the corporate baking program. For more information about the Foundation’s holding of tez, please take a look at the latest biannual report. 

Our current policy is the following: the Tezos Foundation’s bakers don’t vote during the first phase (Proposal). During the second (Exploration) and fourth (Promotion) phase, these bakers vote “pass”. Bakers’ votes can be seen here.  

A custodian’s role is to safekeep securities from its customers. The Tezos Foundation moves some of the Foundation’s tez to custodians in order to mitigate potential risks linked to holding all tez in one place (e.g. theft, loss).

The Tezos Foundation uses several custodians located in Switzerland, the European Union and Asia.

The Tezos Foundation is aware of an ongoing misinformation campaign falsely claiming that it is covertly selling large amounts of tez on various exchanges. These rumors are baseless and unequivocally false. They grew upon flawed research that pinpoints an address — which is clearly owned by a custodian, and is shared by all of the custodian’s brokerage customers — as belonging to the Tezos Foundation. It is not the Tezos Foundation’s policy to address every baseless rumor as reacting to them can actually encourage the spread of more misinformation. Nonetheless, due to the clear, long standing, and repeated attempts at damaging the reputation of the Foundation we decided, exceptionally, to clarify the matter.

The Tezos Foundation has accelerated efforts to create awareness of Tezos and provide education about the new, exciting developments within the ecosystem. In May 2021, we introduced Blokhaus, a marketing and communications team dedicated to help streamline and amplify marketing-related activities for the Tezos brand and ecosystem. Blokhaus is set to greatly increase awareness for Tezos through marketing campaigns, sponsorship & partnership initiatives, advertising, public relations, and more.

As Tezos continues to grow and evolve, we are constantly looking for new initiatives and ideas to promote Tezos as widely as possible and our goal is to support marketing initiatives across all projects within the ecosystem.

The press kit for Tezos can be accessed at tezos.com/stats.

Across the ecosystem, various teams have rolled out community rewards programs that will allocate some treasury funds for community disbursement. For this program, we will allocate tez to a multisig contract each month. Those tez will be disbursed as rewards to community members for contributions they’ve made to the project that month. The various teams managing these community grants  have released further details about how the program will work and we look forward to seeing how this new initiative sparks community engagement and incentivizes participation in the ecosystem.

How do I activate my XTZ allocation?

In order to activate your XTZ allocation, you must first complete the KYC process by creating an account and providing the necessary documentation at https://verification.tezos.foundation/. Please note that to complete this process you will need to input the public key hash(es) for the wallets you wish to activate (up to 3 per process).

Note: Never share your private key hash with anyone — only the public key hash is required for this process.

Upon completion of the KYC process, you will receive an activation code–this may take up to a few days. You can then use this activation code to activate your recommended allocation from the fundraiser. To do so, go to https://activate.tezos.com – you will need to enter your public key hash(es) and the corresponding activation code(s) for each. The activation can take some time to complete.

Haven’t received the activation code email? Be sure to check your email’s spam folder.

How do I access my XTZ allocation?

After completing the KYC/AML verification process as well as the activation process, you then need to import your fundraiser wallet into one of the available Tezos wallets. Note that not all Tezos wallets include the ability to import a fundraiser account, therefore please be sure to select a wallet that has that functionality. You can see a list of wallets on Tezos here.

Which Tezos wallets are available for me to use?

There are numerous wallets to choose from. Please visit https://tezos.com/learn/store-and-use/ to see the available options – note that not all wallets are able to import fundraiser accounts, therefore, if you are hoping to access your fundraiser account allocation, please select a wallet that includes that capability.

We strongly recommend that you do not trust wallets suggested to you on social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) or instant messaging platforms (Telegram, Discord, Slack, etc.) and that you carefully verify that the wallets you download are from official sources only.

I have lost my password–is there any process in place to recover it?

The Fundraiser Password Recovery Tool is a tool to help those who contributed to the Tezos Foundation’s fundraiser, lost the passwords they entered when generating Tezos public key hashes, and can no longer access recommended allocations of XTZ tokens as a result.

The time it may take to recover a fundraiser password depends on several factors: the complexity of a fundraiser password, accuracy of clues provided, volume of contributors using this tool, etc. Although it may take a while to recover a fundraiser password, we will do our best to get through inquiries as quickly as possible.

Please read the Password Recovery Tool Waiver carefully to understand the risks associated with password recovery.

There are a number of desktop, web, and mobile wallets built exclusively for Tezos that are currently available to use including Kukai, Temple, Umami and more. For hardware wallets there is support for both Ledger and Trezor. That being said, we are always evaluating our funding priorities and have allocated further funds for additional wallets to make Tezos even more accessible.

There are a number of considerations we need to take into account, particularly non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and other legal frameworks in place surrounding an audit. Due to these variables, releasing financial statements is simply not feasible as it would be a breach of contractual non-disclosure agreements.

The Foundation takes network security very seriously and has been having an internal discussion over the last few months about ways to dedicate more staff to the security of the chain and ecosystem. We will provide further information about our efforts to ensure the security of the network shortly, but rest assured that security of the chain and ecosystem is one of our highest priorities.

In the summer of 2017, the Tezos Foundation received contributions in Bitcoin and Ether to help develop the Tezos protocol and support the Tezos community. The Tezos protocol was made available under an MIT Open Source License in June 2018, which means that, since that time, anyone has been able to use it to launch a new network. On June 30, 2018, the Tezos Foundation announced the betanet launch of an instance of the Tezos protocol — the Tezos Network — and a recommended allocation of XTZ to contributors. Contributors had the option of either accepting or rejecting the proposed allocation expressed by either choosing to support the Tezos Network with the recommended allocation or launch a different version of the Tezos protocol and propose a different allocation. Since the betanet launch, the Tezos Network has become the primary network using the Tezos protocol.

Prior to receiving contributions, the Tezos Foundation retained Swiss and U.S. counsel for legal and regulatory advice and prior to the launch retained PwC as an independent auditor. At the time, the regulatory frameworks governing digital assets were changing rapidly — indeed, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had not even issued the DAO Report — and the Tezos Foundation sought to understand and operate within those shifting and uncertain guidelines.

The U.S. is a very litigious country, and plaintiffs’ lawyers devote their careers to looking for lawsuits to file to make money. That is their business, and in the U.S., it is easy for them to file a lawsuit and make allegations against others. These lawyers know that litigation is expensive and that most defendants would prefer to settle a lawsuit and move on rather than fight it and spend years and millions of dollars in legal fees. Around the time that the Tezos Foundation received the contributions, numerous plaintiffs’ lawyers sought to exploit the novelty of digital assets and the underlying blockchain technology by filing lawsuits under U.S. securities law.

So, notwithstanding the legal and regulatory advice it received, in late 2017 and early 2018, the Tezos Foundation and certain other entities and individuals associated with the development of the Tezos protocol were named as defendants in what are referred to as putative class action lawsuits. Those lawsuits did not allege that any defendant committed fraud or engaged in any other nefarious conduct. Rather, they alleged merely that the Tezos Foundation should have filed a registration statement under the U.S. securities laws with respect to the contribution. The allegations in those lawsuits — which were never proven — were made by a few private plaintiffs in the U.S. — not government regulators. Those plaintiffs were represented by lawyers working on a contingency basis and seeking a percentage of any recovery.

The Tezos Foundation and other defendants vigorously defended themselves in those lawsuits for over two years. At all times, they denied — and continue to deny — the allegations in those lawsuits and any wrongdoing arising out of those allegations, including that XTZ was or is a security. Not one claim was ever proven, but the lawsuits were a drain on the Tezos Foundation’s resources and distracted from its mission. So, like the vast majority of defendants, the Tezos Foundation and the other defendants agreed to settle the lawsuits — without any admission or finding of fault or wrongdoing. The Tezos Foundation settled only because it was in the best interest of the Tezos community to remove the distraction, expense, and risk those lawsuits created. That was the right decision, and with the cloud of private litigation removed, the Tezos community flourished. Again, those were opportunistic lawsuits filed by plaintiffs’ lawyers making unproven allegations. They were not filed by any government regulator, and in fact, no enforcement proceeding has ever been filed against the Tezos Foundation.