# Diving into Tezos (thread) By [Vaibhav Basantani](https://paragraph.com/@basantani) · 2022-02-05 --- Recently I read about the Tezos blockchain and how different it is from the other chains. What is it, how does it work and what's happening with Tezos? A thread 🧵 * * * The most dominant and widely adopted blockchain is Ethereum at the moment. Solana is proving to be a great alternative day by day due to its speedy and extremely low-cost transactions. But there's a dark horse that needs to be highlighted and talked about and it's Tezos. Before proceeding, whatever problem a team is seeking to solve might very well be solved by the Ethereum Layer 2 solutions (such as Immutable X, Polygon, etc.) or by other blockchains like Solana. This post is just to bring some highlights on Tezos and talk about its features. Tezos is a self-amending blockchain which means that it can upgrade & develop itself whenever needed. Upgrades and amendment processes are done in the core protocols of the blockchains with time. In Tezos' case, the people who own & stake it have a say in its amendment process as it gives them the voting power. It follows a liquid-proof of stake method which allows the stakers to liquidate any time they want without having any lockup period. Recently they've had a big update which is the Granada upgrade. But why is it a big deal? Because it has brought down transaction costs by 3x to 6x and has also decreased the block formation time from 60 to 30 seconds ( Ethereum has 12-14 seconds tho ) In terms of flexibility & easy upgrades, Tezos clearly wins since most of the blockchains use a fork-based governance model that involves asking people to take some action from their end like upgrading their software & it slows down the process while adopting new changes. But Tezos has an on-chain governance system that involves self-amendment which lowers the cost of upgrade and speeds up the process significantly. No hard forks are involved here since the main chain is upgraded and it doesn't create multiple versions of the blockchain. BTC & Eth went thru hard forks & hence today we have BTC Cash & Eth from Eth Classic. Lastly, it offers an open-source platform to form tokens & DApps. It has a Formal Verification Mechanism that offers strong security & it ensures the smart contract works as it is intended to. Apart from the tech, Tezos has had a roller-coaster ride till now. From having some disputes in the top management after having their ICO in 2017 to concluding a lawsuit last year, Tezos has had a troublesome time. Check out the whole story: [https://hackernoon.com/the-curious-tale-of-tezos-from-a-232-million-ico-to-4-class-action-lawsuits-6f411b7aad7e](https://hackernoon.com/the-curious-tale-of-tezos-from-a-232-million-ico-to-4-class-action-lawsuits-6f411b7aad7e) It will be interesting to see how things unfold ahead. We see Tezos NFT platforms like Hicetnunc, Kalamint, OneOf, etc, and wallets like Galleon, Kukai surfacing recently and they have the potential to grow from where they are right now. Thanks for reading folks! --- *Originally published on [Vaibhav Basantani](https://paragraph.com/@basantani/diving-into-tezos-thread)*