On the Way to 1 000 000 TPS: the History of Tezos Updates
In a few days, the year 2022 will come to an end. Instead of the usual annual recap of our activity, we decided to look back at the history of Tezos updates.
The post explores how the protocol has changed and what new things appeared in it after the Genesis block.
Genesis/Alpha — July 2018
On 1 July 2018, the Tezos Foundation launched an experimental version of the Tezos protocol and baking with the promise of moving completed transactions to the main network. The block time back then was 1 minute.
On 17 September 2018, Tezos Foundation announced the launch of the Tezos mainnet. The size of the roll was 10,000 tez. Next, the developers applied patches that adjusted the minimum transaction fees and voting mechanism. Yes, voting for protocol updates was in Tezos from the beginning.
Athens — March 2019
The update reduced the minimum roll size from 10,000 to 8,000 tez and doubled the gas limit on transactions and the block. Developers became able to write more complex smart contracts.
The rest of Athens’ changes dealt with bug fixes and improved developer experience. For example, running a private blockchain sandbox with ready-made smart contracts in the Genesis block became possible.
Babylon — October 2019
The main feature was the new consensus algorithm Emmy+, which introduced a variant delay of block creation time depending on missed confirmations.
Developers also updated Michelson: smart contracts got rid of one big_map limit. A quorum appeared in voting. Whereas in Athens, a proposal moved to the next stage with at least one affirmative vote, in Babylon, a 5% vote was required.
Carthage — March 2020
The developers have once again increased the gas limit, this time by 30%. There were a few Michelson fixes, such as a bug that caused the MAP instruction to undo all changes to items in the map or list after applying them.
Delphi — November 2020
Developers have applied dozens of patches to reduce gas consumption during operations. In addition, they improved Michelson’s performance so that Tezos nodes fully use modern hard disks’ speed.
Delphi has also reduced the cost of writing data to the blockchain by a factor of 4, from 1 to 0.25 tez per 1KB. The account creation fee was reduced from 0.064 tez instead of 0.025 tez.
Edo — February 2021
This update turned out to be boring from the users’ point of view but interesting for the developers. It brought about the fifth voting period, adoption, during which bakers could prepare for the activation of the update in peace. The voting period was reduced from 92 days to 71.
Michelson integrated Sapling, a solution for anonymous transactions and tickets and comb pairs.
Florence — May 2021
The update doubled the maximum operation size to 32KB. The operation queue within the smart contract has changed from breadth-first to depth-first. Another optimization of gas consumption was implemented.
Baking accounts were eliminated from the original proposal, whereby bakers could unbundle baking keys from their public address without asking users to redelegate funds when changing keys.
Granada — August 2021
Liquidity baking with a subsidy of 2.5 tez per block appeared. Developers also proposed a new Emmy* consensus algorithm, which reduced block creation time from 60 to 30 seconds.
Another optimization of the gas operation: the cost of storage operations was reduced tenfold, and the cost of calling smart contracts shrunk fivefold.
Hangzhou — December 2021
The update introduced new primitives: timelock to hide transaction contents for a certain period, on-chain view for secure contract browsing of other contract stores, global constants, and a popular contract cache for nodes.
Ithaca 2 — April 2022
The developers removed the rolls that gave a baker with 15,999 tez the same chance to mine a block as a baker with 8,001 tez. The minimum stake to start a node was also reduced from 8,000 to 6,000 tez.
Tezos got the deterministic consensus algorithm Tenderbake instead of the probabilistic Emmy*. Transactions reached finality in 2 blocks instead of 6.
Jakarta — June 2022
The highlight was the announcement of Optimistic Rollups for transactions or TORUs. In addition to these, the developers have improved ticketing and Sapling contracts and made Michelson even safer.
Kathmandu — September 2022
In addition to TORUs, they announced SCORUs: optimistic rollups with the ability to execute smart contracts.
The Verifiable Delay Function, or VRF, or on-chain generation of truly random numbers, was introduced. The Validation Pipelining Project was also launched, which accelerated block distribution over the network, and Ghostnet, a permanent testnet, came into being.
Lima — December 2022
The latest Tezos update is announcing Kernel-Based Optimistic Rollups, i.e., with custom virtual machines.
There has been another update to the tickets that had to be used in DEKU-based rollups and sidechains. They also reintroduced baking keys that had been abandoned in Florence.
Mumbai — Expected in 2023
Mumbai should be the biggest update so far. Rollups will finally appear in the mainnet, block creation time will be reduced to 15 seconds, and the Tezos version of ZK-Rollups will appear in the testnet with accelerated transaction finalization on L1.
Conclusion
Tezos’ core developers have done a tremendous amount of work in four years. For users, the most notable changes were the updates to the consensus algorithm:
- block creation time decreased from 60 seconds to 15 seconds;
- the cost of using smart contracts was reduced by a factor of 20;
- the speed of transaction finalization decreased from 5 to 1 minute.
- liquidity baking appeared.
Along with the updates, the ecosystem grew. Algorithmic stablecoins and various DeFi projects came into being, NFTs boomed, and high-profile partnerships were concluded.
In 2023, Tezos will reach 1,000,000 transactions per second with rollups and sidechains. Hopefully, new projects will utilize the increased bandwidth and contribute to transitioning from a bear to a bull market.
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