Welcome to Listing Sundays, CryptoSlate's weekly feature offering in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.
The last time I sat down with Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman was at the Paris Blockchain Week Conference in 2019. The date is seared in my memory, as it coincided with the devastating fire at Notre Dame Cathedral. I can still recall the collective gasps of a stunned crowd gathered nearby as angry orange flames engulfed the iconic spire and thick black smoke billowed into the evening sky.
Despite the real-world tragedy unfolding, the energy at the conference was palpable. It was still early days for crypto, a time when ambitious ideas often outpaced the available technology, creating a significant gap between the industry's promise and its marketing reality.
DeFi wasn't a buzzword yet. Decentralized exchanges were widely mocked for their sluggish speeds and wafer-thin liquidity. IDEX, a pioneer at the time, dominated the DEX charts with a monthly volume of 400K ETH, trading at a collective price of around $150 per coin.
Privacy coins had not faced major regulatory crackdowns. You could often trade crypto on and off-ramps without KYC, and figures like John McAfee were still making headlines from their international travels.
Many projects were simply blockchain-themed replicas of Web2 applications that could have functioned just fine without a distributed ledger.
You get the picture: a fancy website, a glossy whitepaper, and an opportunist leader who would likely end up in legal trouble with regulators.
Even in the depths of a bear market, these events still drew a sizable crowd, debating blockchain scalability, the path to mainstream adoption, winning the trust of traditional finance, and the need for clear crypto regulation. 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, who was keen to tout the virtues of the country's new PACTE law for digital assets and emphasize the legitimacy of France's blockchain vision. In a stark contrast, the event was MC'd by a well-known crypto podcast duo whose fraternity-style humor and ill-judged jokes about France fell predictably flat.
Six years ago, crypto was the wild west, and anything seemed possible. As the scalability debates of the Layer 1s intensified, Tezos—the self-amending blockchain launched in response to Bitcoin's lack of programmability—was a legitimate contender as an “Ethereum killer.”
Fast forward to today, and Tezos has a new mission: conquering the RWA sector by tokenizing uranium. And Notre Dame has a new spire.
As the “blockchain designed to evolve,” Tezos has shifted its focus with the industry narratives, from digital money to DeFi, from NFTs to gaming, and now to Real World Assets (RWAs). It has weathered the crypto winter better than many fallen projects thanks to its “adaptability,” “acting as a store of value,” and the “discreet power” of its main foundation, which raised a substantial $232 million in Bitcoin during its 2017 ICO.
Exchanging greetings today, Arthur Breitman is candid and relaxed. He's shed some of the formality I remembered from 2019 and speaks with the conviction of a man who has navigated crypto’s turbulent cycles. I remind him that we've met before, and while I doubt he remembers the specific encounter, he nods graciously and smiles as I recall his past ambitions for Tezos to become the most widely used blockchain and his predictions of industry consolidation.
“I had a few theses that were wrong,” he admits. “One thesis was that at some point, people were going to get tired of buying new coins, because they would keep diluting everything, and you wouldn't be able to make money easily by just launching a new token… This was clearly wrong!”
He chuckles wryly as his eyes drift towards the bustling exhibition hall below, with its loud booths and colorful merchandise.
“There's still very much a playbook where you raise a bunch of money from VCs. You launch a coin. You own 90% of the tokens, and you flood the market with them.”
At a time when platforms churn out tokens by the second, meme coins rank higher than Tezos by market cap, and even 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 magnificent—but there's a lot of delusion that took over in crypto, and I don't like the delusion. I came in for the technology, for the philosophy, for the political aspect of it… If you look now, that's been drowned out.”
Arthur and his wife Kathleen launched Tezos to be a sandbox for innovation—a place to try experiments not possible on Bitcoin. Their self-amending blockchain was designed to remove the need for contentious forks and prioritize on-chain governance. He explains:
“It's a core concept 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 just that most of them accept the trust that comes with having a dev team that says, ‘Time to fork.’”
In contrast, Arthur says Tezos has never compromised on its broad accessibility. The entire network can be run on a Raspberry Pi, lowering the barriers to becoming a ‘baker’ (the Tezos equivalent of a validator) and enabling the network to grow in a meaningfully decentralized way. It's also indisputably secure, with no major incidents or hacks over the years.
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 shake-ups, and a slide from its position as a top-10 coin to the second page of CoinGecko.
From changing the way people think about money to hosting thriving NFT art markets, Tezos has pivoted several times, demonstrating 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 huge—we're not talking about $100 million raises or anything like that—but it's real.”
I ask if constantly changing direction risks a loss of identity. But while you can find meme coins on Tezos, Arthur insists they aren't part of its core culture.
“It's not about whether it's there. It’s more like, is this seen as your brand? 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 genuine. 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 ledgers, and we didn't want to do that.
Optimism, when it launched, had no fraud proofs whatsoever. It was all 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.”
Tezos' most recent play is in the RWA sector, with the launch of metal.io, a new platform offering tokens that represent physical ownership of uranium. It's an industry-first, and it’s what brought Arthur 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 mention that I'd read uranium had outperformed the S&P 500, with returns rivaling 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 investment thesis for uranium is based on three core pillars: shifting attitudes towards nuclear power, Western governments' push for energy security, and the sustained demand from AI.
Uranium is a critical fuel for nuclear energy, and its market has historically been opaque and difficult for most investors to access. By bringing uranium on-chain, metal.io democratizes exposure to an asset class previously reserved for a select few.
“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, and 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 great asset to be long on.”
What makes Tezos a suitable platform for tokenized RWAs?
“There's a reputation, you know? It's intangible, but there's a reputation for rigor. In the same way that a luxury product doesn't want to be sitting next to a non-luxury product.”
Looking ahead, what's next for Tezos, and where does Arthur see it in the next five years? “The next five years?” He laughs.
“That's really difficult to predict, especially given the timelines in crypto, where everything is very rapid. 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 heading in, and the direction is massive scalability with Tezos X.”
Tezos X aims to be a massive, developer-friendly rollup that supports popular programming languages like JavaScript and Python, attracting 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, where what looks like a whale in a tracksuit is posing for photos.
If Arthur is right about being long on uranium and the demand continues to rise, Tezos could be onto something big, perhaps even sweeping its name back to the forefront of the industry. If not, well, Tezos will adapt and evolve with the times once again.
