Skip to main content

Using Tezos

This section presents Tezos for end users who need to access applications that use Tezos as part of their platform. Thus, no technical expertise is assumed, such as designing or developing new applications.

Tezos is a blockchain, which is a network of computers that allows a group of users to run computer tasks in an open, transparent, and secure way. As a Tezos user, you may have come to the platform for many reasons, including:

  • Paying or accepting payments in the Tezos cryptocurrency (known as tez and occasionally by the symbol ꜩ or the ticker symbol XTZ)
  • Authenticating to web applications, like you might log in to a web site with a user name or email address
  • Creating your own cryptocurrencies or other exchangeable digital assets, known as tokens
  • Running smart contracts to perform computation tasks in a transparent, censorship-proof way

What else can I do with Tezos?​

Blockchains like Tezos have these general properties:

  • Any user has access to all of the stored data
  • Any user can make changes to the data, as long they follow a set of rules
  • No small subset of users can control the system

You can take advantage of these features to do many different things with a blockchain, but the common tasks fall into these categories:

  • Decentralized storage: Users can store data in such a way that the data is available to all users forever, or at least as long as the blockchain system is running
  • Decentralized currency: Users agree on a currency and its behavior and use decentralized storage to record which accounts have what amount of currency
  • Decentralized computing: Users put programs known as smart contracts in the decentralized storage and allow other users to run those programs

How do I get started?​

The first thing you need to work with Tezos is a wallet application; see Wallets. Then you can use the wallet to generate a Tezos account; see Accounts.

Most things that you do with Tezos require a small amount of tez as a transaction fee. You can get tez by buying it or exchanging another cryptocurrency for it on the cryptocurrency exchanges listed at https://tezos.com/tez/#exchanges.

Then you can use the wallet to connect to and use applications that use Tezos, like the Staking application or Tezos-powered games, listed at https://tezos.com/gaming/players.

Last updated on