Welcome to the Tezos Developer Documentation!

The Project

Tezos is a distributed consensus platform with meta-consensus capability. Tezos not only comes to consensus about the state of its ledger, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. It also attempts to come to consensus about how the protocol and the nodes should adapt and upgrade.

The source code of Tezos is placed under the MIT Open Source License.

The Community

The Networks

Mainnet

The Tezos network is the current incarnation of the Tezos blockchain. It runs with real tez that have been allocated to the donors of July 2017 ICO (see Activate fundraiser account - Mainnet).

The Tezos network has been live and open since June 30th 2018.

All the instructions in this documentation are valid for Mainnet however we strongly encourage users to first try all the introduction tutorials on Alphanet to familiarize themselves without risks.

Alphanet

Tezos Alphanet is a test network for the Tezos blockchain with a faucet to obtain free tez (see Get free tez). It is updated and rebooted rarely and it is running the same code as the Mainnet. It is the reference network for developers wanting to test their software before going to beta and for users who want to familiarize themselves with Tezos before using their real tez.

We offer support for Alphanet on IRC.

The Tezos Alpha (test) network has been live and open since February 2017.

Zeronet

Zeronet is the most cutting-edge development network of Tezos. It is restarted without notice, possibly several times a day. This network is mostly used internally by the Tezos developers and may have different constants from Alphanet or Mainnet, for example it has shorter cycles and a shorter interval between blocks. We offer no support for the Zeronet.

Getting started

The best place to start exploring the project is following the How Tos in the introduction.

Indices and tables