Tezos Board Shake-up: Gevers Steps Down

The Tezos Foundation announced it is replacing two of its board members, Johann Gevers and Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons, with new appointees.

Ryan Jesperson and Michel Mauny will take over for Pons and Gevers. Gevers had been involved in a public dispute with Tezos founders Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, over his contract. The dispute has involved lawsuits, accusations of public defamation, and an effort by Gevers to set up his own competing foundation and appeal to Swiss regulators to grant him authority over funds raised in Tezos’ USD 232 million initial coin offering (ICO), which closed in July, 2017.

Governance over those funds and the non-profit foundation has been in doubt throughout the dispute. According to an announcement from the Tezos Foundation, both members resigned voluntarily.

Tezos launched its ICO with a plan to build a blockchain with a better system of formal governance, based on a technology called formal verification. The Tezos Foundation is a Swiss non-profit, tasked with overseeing the development and growth of the proposed open-source network.

According to a news release from the Tezos Foundation, the board shakeup prepares the body to “assist in the timely launch of the Tezos network.”

Jesperson is described as recently having emerged as “a leading figure in the Tezos community.” Jesperson was most recently chief operating officer at Divvy, a fintech company, according to the release.

Mauny is described as a senior researcher, specializing in programming languages, at the French digital research organization Inria. From 1989 to 2005, he worked on OCaml, a programming language on which Tezos is based, according to the release.

The full release is here: https://tezosfoundation.ch/news/tezos-board-reorganized/.