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The last time I interviewed Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman was at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit in 2019. It coincided with the fire of Notre Dame, and I can still hear the gasps of a dumbstruck crowd gathered opposite the cathedral as the angry orange flames engulfed the spire of “Our Lady of Paris,” and the thick black smoke billowed into the evening sky.
Despite the historic tragedy at the medieval cathedral, the energy at the conference was high. It was still early days when most ideas outpaced the technology, and there was a gulf between engineering and marketing.
DeFi wasn’t a thing yet. Decentralized exchanges were scoffed at for their lack of speed and wafer-thin liquidity, and IDEX dominated the charts with a monthly volume of 400K ETH, trading for the knockdown price of ~$150 a coin.
Privacy coins hadn’t been persecuted. You could on and off-ramp crypto without KYC, and John McAfee was still on a boat in the Bahamas, defying the IRS (God, rest his soul).
Most projects were replications of web2 apps attached to a blockchain that could have functioned perfectly well without it.
- “Tell me about [insert novel name here],” I would ask.
- “It’s Salesforce on the blockchain.”
- “It’s Uber on Neo.”
- “It’s a decentralized Travelocity.”
- “It’s transparent space travel…”
You get the idea: a flashy website, a fancy whitepaper, and an opportunistic leader who would likely end up in a battle with the SEC.
Even in the depths of the bear, these events still drew a decent-sized crowd, debating blockchain scalability, the path to mass adoption, winning the hearts and minds of traditional financial institutions, and when to expect a clear regulatory framework for crypto… Some things haven’t changed. Others feel like a lifetime ago.
The event was opened by Bruno Le Maire, the French Minister for the Economy, keen to sing the virtues of the country’s newly released PACTE law for digital assets, and emphasize the seriousness of France’s blockchain bet. In a bizarrely stark contrast, it was MCed by Bad Crypto, a crass American podcast duo whose frat boy humor and misplaced jokes about the French went down as well as you might imagine.
Six years ago, crypto was the frontier, and anything was possible. At a time when the battle of the Layer 1s was intensifying, Tezos, the self-amending blockchain launched in response to Bitcoin’s lack of innovation and programmability, was a contender as an “Ethereum killer.”
Fast-forward to 2025, and Tezos has a new aspiration: conquering the RWA sector by tokenizing uranium. And Notre Dame has a new spire.
Tezos, the blockchain designed to evolve
As the “blockchain designed to evolve,” Tezos has moved with the narratives, from money to DeFi, NFTs to memes, and RWAs. It has avoided the dumpster fire of fallen cryptos thanks to its “adaptability,” “resilience as a value,” and “prudent management” of its significant treasury (Tezos raised $232 million in Bitcoin in its 2017 raise).
Exchanging greetings today, Arthur Breitman is candid and relaxed. He’s lost some of the bravado of 2019 and speaks with the humility of a man who’s weathered crypto’s turbulent cycles. I remind him that we’ve met before, and even though I doubt he remembers, he nods kindly and smiles as I recall his ambitions for Tezos to be the most widely used blockchain and his predictions of a consolidation of the space.
“I had a few theses that were wrong,” he says. “One thesis was that at some point, people were going to be tired of buying new coins, because they would keep diluting everything, and you would not be able to make money easily by just launching a new coin… This was clearly wrong!”
He chuckles ruefully as his eyes travel to the exhibition hall below with its loud booths and colorful merch.
“There’s still very much a playbook where you raise a bunch of money for VCs. You launch a coin. You own 90% of the tokens, and you flood the market with them.”
At a time when pump.fun spews out tokens by the second, Fartcoin ranks higher than Tezos by market cap, and the President of the United States has his own meme coin; does Arthur still have the same passion and drive for what he does? He sighs:
“I’ve been disappointed with how the rest of the ecosystem has moved on—not the Tezos ecosystem, which is brilliant—but there’s a lot of nihilism that took over in crypto, and I don’t like the nihilism. I came in for the technology, for the ideology, for the political aspect of it… If you look today, that’s been drowned out.”
Arthur and his wife Kathleen launched Tezos in the first place to be a breeding ground for innovation and a place to try experiments not possible on Bitcoin, with a self-amending blockchain that removed the need for contentious forks and prioritized on-chain governance. He explains:
“It’s a core property of Tezos; the fact that the blockchain can evolve. We’ve seen a lot of blockchains evolve by force now, so it’s not like every blockchain is stuck. It’s like most of them accept the centralization that comes with having a dev team that says, “Time to fork.”
In contrast, Arthur says Tezos has never compromised on decentralization. The whole network can be run on a Raspberry Pi, reducing the barriers to becoming a ‘baker’ (the Tezos equivalent of a validator) and enabling the network to expand in a meaningfully decentralized way. It’s also demonstrably secure, with no major incidents or issues over the years.
A culture of doing things for real
Like every project in the web3 world, Tezos’ journey hasn’t been linear. It has included a grueling battle with the SEC, some high-profile internal shuffles, and a tumble from its status as a top-10 coin to the second page of Coingecko.
From changing the way people think about money to embracing NFTs and memes, Tezos has pivoted several times, highlighting the “adaptability” that Arthur describes as one of its core strengths.
“We have a thriving art community on Tezos with real artists making real NFTs. It’s not economically massive—we’re not talking about $100 million raises or anything like that—but it’s real.”
I wonder if frequently changing course results in some kind of identity loss. But while you can find meme coins on Tezos, Arthur insists they’re not part of its core culture.
“It’s not about whether it’s there. It’s more like, is this seen as your culture? Is this seen as what you’re primarily about?”
And what is Tezos primarily about? How would Arthur describe its core culture?
“If I had to define it, it’s doing things for real, it’s real. When we did the Etherlink rollup, it was decentralized for real. Almost every rollup out there is custodial. If you’re on Base, for example, Coinbase has the keys to it. Coinbase can do whatever it wants with your assets. Coinbase has just as much access to your assets on Base as it does with its internal order books, and we didn’t want to do that.
Optimism, when it launched, had no fraud proofs whatsoever. It was entirely based on trust. So we did it for real. We do blockchain governance for real. So I would say if there’s a culture, it’s a culture of doing things for real.”
Tokenized uranium and Arthur’s latest thesis
Tezos’ most recent venture is in the RWA sector, with the launch of uranium.io, a new platform selling tokens that represent physical ownership of the element. It’s an industry-first, and it’s brought him to TOKEN2049 today.
“Why would people want to invest in uranium?” I ask. “I wanted to, and that’s why I thought it was interesting,” he replies. I tell him I read somewhere that uranium had outpaced the S&P 500, with superior returns to Bitcoin or gold. “I don’t like that metric,” he says, wrinkling his nose. “I don’t look at past performance as an indicator of future performance.”
Instead, he says his thesis for investing in uranium is based on three core pillars: changing attitudes to nuclear power, Western governments’ scramble for energy security, and the continued trajectory of AI.
Uranium is a critical commodity for nuclear energy, and its market has historically been opaque and complex for most investors to access. By bringing uranium on-chain, uranium.io democratizes exposure to an asset class previously reserved for a handful of investors.
“The younger generation is far more concerned with global warming than nuclear war… If you look at the polls in the U.S., Republicans are generally in favor of nuclear power, with Democrats, the majority is still against, but it’s a huge generational divide… If you look at the trend in favor of nuclear power, at some point it’s going to cross 50% and they’re going to start building a lot of nuclear power plants… it seems like a good asset to be long.”
What makes Tezos a suitable platform for tokenized RWAs?
“There’s a reputation, you know? It’s intangible, but there’s a reputation for seriousness. In the same way that a luxury product doesn’t want to be sitting next to a non-luxury product.”
Will Tezos’ bet on uranium pay off?
Looking forward, what’s next for Tezos, and where does Arthur envision it in the next five years? “The next five years?” He laughs.
“That’s very hard to predict, especially given the timelines in crypto, where everything is very fast. I don’t even know where the world is going to be in five years with AI. But I can tell you which direction we’re going in, and the direction is massive scalability with Tezos X.”
Tezos X aims to be a large, developer-friendly rollup that supports popular programming languages like JavaScript and Python, and attracts projects with genuine utility and liquidity.
“We are trying to push applications that we see as resilient and make sense for the space. There’s a tendency for a lot of companies to just tell stories.”
He rolls his eyes and gazes toward the exhibition hall again. What looks like a whale in an astronaut suit is posing for photos.
If Arthur is right about being long uranium and the demand continues to rise, Tezos could be on to something big, perhaps even returning its name to the forefront of the industry again. If not, well, Tezos will adapt and evolve with the times once again.
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