Who Is Arthur Breitman? Tezos Co-Founder

Arthur Breitman is a co-founder of the Tezos blockchain and a director at Trilitech, and he sits on the Tezos Foundation's council. He and Kathleen Breitman created Tezos (XTZ), a blockchain designed to change its own rules when its stakeholders vote, and its token sale ran in July 2017.

Tezos's public code history credits Arthur Breitman with 31 commits, starting with the code's first public release in September 2016. Breitman's last credited commit came in November 2018, and no later commit in that history lists him as its author. His later public roles in Tezos include a seat on the Tezos Foundation's council and talks on conference stages.

Who Created Tezos?

Arthur and Kathleen Breitman created Tezos. Trilitech lists Arthur Breitman as a co-founder of the Tezos project, and the court's summary of the complaint in the 2017 class action says the two conceived it.

That summary says the pair formed Dynamic Ledger Solutions (DLS) in 2015 to hold the project's intellectual property, with Kathleen Breitman as chief executive and Arthur as chief technology officer. It takes its facts from the complaint, which the court had to accept as true for the motion it was deciding.

The design came first, in a position paper dated 3 August 2014 and a white paper dated 2 September 2014, both signed "L.M Goodman".

The position paper made its case with an analogy. It argued that coins behave like smartphones that can't talk to older models, so each new coin or fork splits the network effect that gives money its value. Tezos would avoid that by changing its own rules, the voting rules included, when its stakeholders vote. The papers call this a "self-amending crypto-ledger".

The white paper also built in proof of stake and smart contracts, programs that run on the chain itself. Tezos's code followed on 8 September 2016, in a commit titled "First public release" that the repository's own author map credits to Arthur Breitman.

Who Owns Tezos?

No single company owns Tezos. The Tezos Foundation is a Swiss foundation that backs the network with grants. Its own page says "the Tezos Foundation is not Tezos" and that "we do not manage or operate Tezos and we are only one entity in a global ecosystem."

Several companies build the software. The April 2026 post that set out the Tezos X upgrade came jointly from Nomadic Labs, Trilitech and Functori. Under the white paper's design, stakeholders vote to approve each amendment to the protocol. If you hold a stake in the network, you hold a say in its rules.

Breitman sits on the Tezos Foundation's council and is a director at Trilitech, but neither role makes him an owner of Tezos.

When Was the Tezos ICO?

The Tezos ICO ran from 1 July to 14 July 2017, according to the court's summary of the complaint. An initial coin offering (ICO) lets you buy a new network's tokens straight from the project.

That summary puts the total raised at about $232 million and describes how the sale worked. Contributors sent bitcoin or ether to the Tezos Foundation, which would recommend that the network award them a matching share of tokens. A contribution couldn't be taken back once the blockchain recorded it.

Contributors sued soon after. Their cases were combined in the federal court for Northern California as In re Tezos Securities Litigation. The class action claimed the fundraiser sold unregistered securities. Arthur and Kathleen Breitman were defendants alongside DLS and the Tezos Foundation. On 7 August 2018, Judge Richard Seeborg denied their motions to dismiss, and the case went on.

It ended in a class settlement. A July 2020 filing by lead counsel says the Tezos Foundation would pay $25 million in cash.

The court approved the settlement in its final judgment of 28 August 2020, which says the deal "shall not be deemed an admission by any Settling Party as to the merits of any claim or defense."

Arthur Breitman's Career as Tezos Co-Founder

Breitman's career outside crypto ran through banking and research. The Tezos Foundation's biography says he began as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He later worked as a research engineer at Waymo and at Google X, Google's research lab. Breitman studied applied mathematics at the École Polytechnique and at New York University's Courant Institute.

In February 2021 the Foundation appointed Breitman to a one-year term on its council, calling it his first involvement with the governance of the Foundation. Its page lists him on the council and on its treasury committee, and Trilitech's team page names him a director.

Breitman also speaks for Tezos on stage. His March 2026 keynote at the TezDev conference covered the planned launch of Tezos X, according to Tezos's blog. That upgrade would let Ethereum-style (EVM) apps share one ledger with Tezos's own Michelson contracts. In October 2026 he joined a TOKEN2049 Singapore panel on quantum computing as a threat to crypto. The chief executives of Project Eleven and StarkWare shared that panel.

In April 2026 the researcher Giancarlo Lelli broke an elliptic-curve key on a quantum computer and won Project Eleven's prize for it. The key was far smaller than the ones that guard your Bitcoin wallet.

Bitcoin's developers had already published BIP-360, a quantum-resistant address type in February 2026, and it entered Bitcoin's official list of improvement proposals.

What Does Tezos's Code History Credit Him With?

The 31 commits credited to Breitman come from the main branch of Tezos's GitLab repository. The repository's own author map ties six of his names and email addresses to one person, and the count follows it.

Three of Breitman's November 2017 commits renamed "mining" to "baking", the name Tezos gives to producing blocks. His 2018 commits include a script that allocates tokens in the genesis block and support for secp256k1 signatures. Two 2018 commits signed only "b" aren't in the count, because the author map leaves that name unresolved. Adding them would give 33, with the same last date.

Can You Trade XTZ on Phemex?

XTZ, the Tezos token, has no live perpetual or order-book spot pair on Phemex. The XTZ/USDT futures contract came off Phemex in August 2026, and the XTZ/USDT spot pair followed in September 2026, when XTZ deposits and withdrawals closed as well. The older XTZ/USD and XTZ/USDC markets are delisted too.

If you still have XTZ in a Phemex account, Phemex's September 2026 delisting notice directs withdrawal requests to its support team.

Phemex still runs futures on Bitcoin and other large coins, and the button below takes you to that board. Futures use leverage, and a leveraged position is closed automatically if losses push its margin below a set minimum.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Arthur Breitman still involved with Tezos?

Yes. Breitman is a director at Trilitech and a member of the Tezos Foundation's council. In March 2026 he gave a TezDev keynote on the Tezos X upgrade, and in October 2026 he spoke on a TOKEN2049 panel about quantum risk.

What was the Tezos lawsuit?

A class action brought by contributors to the July 2017 fundraiser, claiming it sold unregistered securities. In 2018 the court refused to dismiss claims against the Breitmans and the Tezos Foundation. It settled in 2020, with the Tezos Foundation agreeing to pay $25 million and no settling party admitting fault.

What did Arthur Breitman do outside crypto?

He was a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley before research engineering jobs at Google X and Waymo. He studied applied mathematics in France at the École Polytechnique and in the US at NYU.

Has Arthur Breitman committed Tezos code since 2018?

Tezos's main public code history credits him with no commit after November 2018, though work in other repositories or under an unmapped name wouldn't show there. His credited work in that history runs from the first public release to a set of 2018 changes.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.