Johann Gevers steps down from Tezos Foundation board

Gevers was responsible for a pile of assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars Nik Hunger

The founding president of the Zug-based blockchain firm Tezos Foundation has relinquished his position. He will be replaced by Ryan Jesperson, former CEO of Divvy. 

Gevers had been locked in a bitter feud with the inventors of the Tezos technology, Arthur and Kathleen Breitman since last autumn. The dispute stalled the project and created a fracture between the foundation and its core developers. Gevers’s exit was announcedExternal link by the Tezos Foundation on Thursday. 

“After months of very hard work under extremely difficult conditions, I’m very happy that we’ve achieved a good resolution that optimally serves the interests of the Tezos project and the wider crypto ecosystem,” Gevers tweeted on Thursday. 

Fellow board member Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons, also quit his position and will be replaced by Michel Mauny, who is a researcher at Inria in Paris. The Tezos board will thus comprise Ryan Jesperson (president), Michel Mauny and Lars Haussmann (appointed end of January). They will be responsible for managing the $1 billion+ stockpile of public contributions for the blockchain technology project. 

Tezos and Tezos Foundation

Tezos launched with much fanfare last summer, promising to build a new system of democratic blockchain governance that would solve differences of opinion without the need for opposing sides to shear off into separate factions.

The idea persuaded people to contribute $232 million ($243 million) in the form of cryptocurrencies in the space of a few days. These funds were then transferred to the Tezos Foundation, set up in July to continue funding the project whilst creating some distance between the Breitmans, their company Dynamic Ledger Solutions, and the assets raised from the public.

The dramatic rise in the value of cryptocurrencies since than swelled that pot to more than $1 billion.