Tezos founders push for legal bailout from Swiss foundation

Tezos, the Theranos of ICOs.

When you know enough rich people, you can raise a lot of money on a PDF of promises.

With all the money Tezos has, they're probably going to do what Theranos did with Walgreens: pay their way into a fancy big partnership that gives the impression that there's something actually going on.

I know that ICOs get a lot of negativity on HN. Sure, a lot of them deserve it, but not all ICOs are started for the sole purpose of raising cash that they otherwise wouldn't be able to raise. ICOs as a form of funding are equally likely to be manipulated as traditional VC funding following trends and hypes (one might argue that they ICO investors are even more gullible to dishonest founders since they are generally less experienced than VCs).

However, certain ICOs are actually bringing products to market that would never otherwise exist. Some of them are trying to fundamentally change how some industries operate. Others are fundamentally improving blockchain technology. But in order for their products to operate they need enough stakeholders to make them viable. And this is where ICOs come in. There were many of us who believed that Tezos was one of those ICOs. Their product could still be greatly useful if executed correctly. Given that they have raised more money then they could ever have hoped for, it is incredible that they are being silly enough to embark on a public dispute between themselves and get involved in lawsuits with their investors. Just getting back to work and executing their initial vision (which they can do many times over with that amount of funds) seems like an obvious thing to do. They would lose a lot more money (or worse) by continuing on this trajectory. It is incredible how short-term greedy they seem from the outside.

Or maybe I am missing some information that would explain this stupidity. I would love to know more.

So what exactly happened here? There was an ICO for a big new smart-contract blockchain with some cool features, and the blockchain never materialized?

I hold the opinion that if you need a public ICO to "get stakeholders" you already failed, or are already successful as a scam.

There are a ton of ways to find and secure proper, reliable stakeholders who are committed to your technology or your cause/product. (Private ICO being one of the ways. Keep things under wrap, develop the technology, have a proof of concept, sell some product, and then MAYBE if it makes sense, go public.) A public ICO blasting across the internet when there is no product, no plan, and no real engineering already done is nothing but a cash grab, and I am not at all surprised that they are embroiled in lawsuits.

It was a project that was and continues to be promising from a development and utility standpoint, but that has been marred by terrible governance, internal politics, and amateurish management