Tezos

The headline difference is self-amendment: Tezos upgrades its own protocol through on-chain voting by its stake holders, so changes ship as smooth protocol iterations rather than contentious hard forks. Ethereum, by contrast, has needed dramatic break events like The Merge in September 2022 to change its consensus model.

Baking is Tezos' liquid proof-of-stake version of mining — bakers produce and validates blocks, and regular holders delegate their tez to a baker to share rewards. To run your own baker you need at least one full roll, which is 8,000 XTZ, so most people simply delegate instead.

Its 2017 token sale raised roughly $232 million, one of the largest at the time, but a bitter dispute between founders Arthur and Kathleen Breitman and the Swiss foundation's then-president Johann Gevers delayed the network. The Tezos blockchain finally went live in 2018, about a year behind schedule.

Its most visible ecosystem is NFTs and digital art, driven by low fees and energy-efficient proof of stake — the objkt.com marketplace is the largest Tezos exchange, and Ubisoft chose Tezos for its Ubisoft Quartz NFT experiment in late 2021. Institutional uses like tokenized assets have also favored its upgradable architecture.