Arthur & Kathleen Breitman

Tezos was launched by the husband-and-wife team of Arthur and Kathleen Breitman.

Before running in quantitative finance, Arthur studied implemented mathematics, computer science, and physics in France and economic mathematics at New York University under Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Arthur was the chief of an anarcho-capitalist organization in New York. Kathleen became a libertarian Republican interested in politics after paying attention to Rush Limbaugh at age 5. Arthur was a follower of Patri Friedman, the founding father of The Seasteading Institute, and he discovered Gevers when Friedman hired him for a venture to construct a libertarian city in Honduras.

At the same time as working at Morgan Stanley in 2014, Arthur Breitman launched two papers providing a new form of blockchain under the pseudonym “L. M Goodman,” referencing a journalist at Newsweek who had misidentified the author of Bitcoin. He selected the name “Tezos” after writing software to list unclaimed websites that might mention in English.

In 2015, he registered Dynamic Ledger Solutions Inc (DLS) in Delaware, with himself as the leader. The Breitmans contracted French company OCamlPro to increase the software. Arthur worked at Morgan Stanley at the time; however, he no longer provided them with notice of his work on Tezos as required via the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). He was fined $20,000. He sought to elevate $5 to $10 million from banks but could not discover backers. By 2016, he left Morgan Stanley; Tezos acquired $612,000 from 10 backers while the Breitmans deliberated on an initial coin offering (ICO).

In 2016, Arthur traveled to meet Gevers in Zug, Switzerland, known for its effective company tax rate of zero and lax guidelines. Putting in a Swiss foundation would keep away from US securities laws, and in 2017 Gevers created the Tezos Foundation in Zug. At the time, he was setting up Monetas, his digital currency. They planned for the organization to become a non-profit that would increase cash via the ICO and collect DLS, which owned the group’s era. They acquired $1.5 million in funding from Tim Draper and hired public relations company, Strange Brew, to sell their project. The company was supposed to have falsely claimed that giant American financial corporations used Tezos.