Tezos Is About to Enact Its First-Ever On-Chain Blockchain Update

After nearly three months of voting by token holders, the Tezos blockchain will undertake a series of backwards-incompatible changes to the network on Wednesday.

After three months of voting and testing, bakers have now officially passed the final voting threshold to activate Athens A on Tezos' main network.

As noted by Jacob Arluck from the Tocqueville Group - a for-profit business development entity funded by the Tezos Foundation - bakers actually passed this last round of voting last Tuesday with over 46,000 rolls cast.

Tezos' final voting phase - called the promotion period - required a minimum participation level of at least 81.39 percent of all Tezos rolls.

"It's not like MakerDAO or Aragon where a whale can just control everything easilyIt's not purely a bunch of whales voting in our system. It's people voting on behalf of a very large number of people."

So-called "Whale voters" have been a contentious issue for other blockchain projects and their systems of on-chain governance.

At least two of them, according to blockchain analytics site Alethio, were ultimately passed and rejected as a result of the preferences of one voter with large token holdings.

"One obvious danger of onchain governance is plutocracy. Unfortunately Aragon's second vote was not even plutocracy. It was just governance by one whale," wrote Evan Van Ness, the author of Week in Ethereum News newsletters, on May 2 regarding the Aragon governance outcomes.

According to Arluck, the defining difference of Tezos' on-chain governance process is that token holders are required to either vote as a baker or delegate their assets to a baker in the system.

"There's still too much friction to voting and to people signaling their preferences. In the future, I want us to be implementingsomething like what Cosmos does with overriding [votes.]". Correction: Both proposals - Athens A and Athens B - suggested an increase to the Tezos gas limit.