Tezos conducted an ICO from June 28, 2017 to July 13, 2017, in which 65,681 BTC and 361,122 ETH were raised. A total of 763,306,929.68 XTZ were issued at launch and allocated as follows:

• 79.59% was allocated to ICO participants
• 0.41% was allocated to Early Backers and contractors
• 10% was allocated to the Tezos Foundation
• 10% was allocated to Dynamic Ledger Solutions (DLS)

The XTZ allocated to the Foundation and DLS are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule with monthly cliffs. The Foundation has half of its XTZ in a vesting smart contract and another half is reserved for DLS when certain milestones are met. When those milestones are met those tokens will be moved into a vesting smart contract for DLS. Until that time the Foundation will use some of these reserved tokens internally as part of the deposit needed for baking.

Tezos founded and on-chain governance design Arthur Breitman first proposed Tezos in a position paper released in Aug. 2014. He later released a white paper in Sept. 2014 that detailed more specifics about the project. Breitman published both articles under the pseudonym "L. M Goodman" akin to Bitcoin's anonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. In the documents, the author stressed Bitcoin's design failed to account for a more inclusive governance process and did not facilitate the creation of new tokens. Breitman and his wife Kathleen, therefore, designed Tezos as a token issuance and smart contract platform with an on-chain governance model, which would allow XTZ holders to vote on proposed protocol upgrades to avoid forking the network.

In 2015, the Breitmans established a company called Dynamic Ledger Solutions (DLS), which was responsible for writing the initial code for Tezos. At its core, Tezos is a system designed to formalize proposing, voting for, and implementing changes to the functionality of the network. Once a proposal is submitted, holders of Tezos (XTZ) tokens can vote with a weighting of one vote per token. DLS released the source code in 2016 and used the codebase to launch an alphanet of the Tezos protocol in Feb. 2017, a few months before the Tezos token sale.

Tezos initial coin offering (ICO) and Foundation troubles The Tezos initial coin offering (ICO) launched on July 1, 2017, and the two-week sale managed to raise ~$232 million in Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH), exceeding the project's target of $20 million. It was the largest ICO at the time, surpassed by Filecoin's ($FIL) ~$257 million token sale a few months later. The newly established Tezos Foundation, led by appointed president Johann Gevers, assumed control of the funds as well as the responsibility to deliver the sold tezzies to ICO contributors. The foundation, which did not include the Breitmans as board members for legal reasons, intended to use a portion of the funds to purchase Dynamic Ledger Solutions (DLS) from the Breitmans, a move that would transfer control of the Tezos codebase to the foundation.

Before the sale of DLS could take place, an internal dispute arose between the Breitmans and Gevers, leading to a delay in the distribution of XTZ tokens to investors. In response, angry investors launched several class-action lawsuits targeting Tezos and DLT, adding further delays to the protocol's development and token issuance event. The internal dispute ran its course by mid-Feb. 2018, when Gevers and another involved foundation member left their positions.

Mainnet launch The foundation's early troubles caused the development team to miss its initial 2017 launch date. After the resolution, protocol development resumed, enabling the Tezos Foundation to release a betanet in June 2018. Once it completed a testing period on the betanet, the foundation launched the Tezos mainnet in Sept. 2018.

The launch introduced a new version of a Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus model. Token holders can participate in consensus by locking up their tokens in exchange for the ability to validate blocks. The industry commonly refers to this process as staking, but the Tezos community uses the synonymous term "baking." The Tezos design expands on traditional PoS systems by enabling users to "delegate" tokens to bakers without transferring ownership. In this self-described "liquid" PoS model, a baker receives a block reward in the form of new XTZ tokens with a proportional amount of this reward distributed to users that delegated tokens to the baker. This system enables smaller token holders to participate in the validation (and reward) process if they hold less than the required amount to become a full baker.