In First, Tezos Blockchain Activates Upgrade By Token Holder Voting

In a first for Tezos, two separate backwards-incompatible changes have been activated on the network after three months of on-chain voting by stakeholders.

The Tezos self-amendment process which began for this first time back in February came to a close late Wednesday with the successful activation of an upgrade proposal, dubbed Athens A, just after 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Proposed by a Tezos developer group called Nomadic Labs, Athens A reduces the minimum amount of tokens called rolls required for a user to become a baker on the network from 10,000 XTZ to 8,000 XTZ. Bakers are the equivalent to miners on a proof-of-work blockchain and are tasked with responsibilities such as verifying transactions and creating new blocks.

"The reduction will result in a bigger amount of XTZ staked," emphasized CMO of Everstake - a staking-as-a-service provider on Tezos - Alexandr Kerya to CoinDesk.

"Now if a baker has 16k, only 10k is staking while after the upgrade the baker will have 2 rolls engaged in staking. There will be fewer 'leftovers' so to speak which is particularly important for small bakers."

Athens A additionally increases computation limits on Tezos blocks to allow for larger transaction throughput.

Agreeing with this sentiment, Awa Sun Yin, founder of the second most popular public baking service on Tezos Cryptium Labs, noted that Tezos' on-chain governance process is "Conservative," requiring high levels of participation and lengthy periods of repetitive voting rounds.

Tezos' on-chain governance process, while mainly for the purposes of gathering community sentiment, also automatizes the process of testing and ultimately rolling out software upgrades on the blockchain.

Rather than requiring users to manually upgrade computer servers - called nodes - in the Tezos network, the upgrade is pushed to all bakers at a specified block number.

"It's similar to how Constantinople happened at a given time," explained Jacob Arluck from the Tocqueville Group - a for-profit business development entity funded by the Tezos Foundation - to CoinDesk.