Welcome to Athens: Tezos Completes 'Historic' First Blockchain Vote

The multimillion-dollar blockchain Tezos has officially concluded its first round of voting for two competing system-wide upgrade proposals.

Having raised a record fundraising amount of $232 million in an initial coin offering in 2017, the Tezos blockchain officially launched last September.

Not without its fair share of internal governance conflicts, today marks the official close of the first round of voting on the Tezos blockchain.

The two proposals dubbed 'Athens A' and 'Athens B' are the first of its kind to undergo Tezos' protocol amendment procedures, designed to roll out system-wide upgrades otherwise known as hard forks in an entirely automated and self-governing fashion.

"The Tezos Foundation decided to remain neutral by not upvoting any proposals. As noted, this contributes to the required quorum and further elevates the voices of other members of the Tezos community in this historic first vote."

First, computation limits per block - also called gas limits - will be increased on the Tezos blockchain to allow for larger transaction throughput.

Second, roll sizes - which are aggregated Tezos tokens that bakers hold in order to be randomly selected in the block creation process - will be decreased from 10,000 XTZ to 8,000 XTZ. As Jacob Arluck from the Tocqueville Group - a for-profit business development entity funded by the Tezos Foundation - explains in a blog post, the amendment would "Incrementally" lower the barrier to entry for baking and subsequently, block creation.

The Exploration Vote Period is the second of four different stages the Athens proposal will move through before eventual activation on the live Tezos blockchain.

After gaining a supermajority of votes to do so - that is 80 percent out of 80 percent quorum - the Athens proposal will advance to another three week period where the Tezos blockchain actually spawns a new but temporary blockchain network.

As the first in a series of proposed upgrades to the Tezos' blockchain still to come, Athens A will likely see activation sometime in late May. "We are mainly interested in seeing the actual protocol upgrade and the entire Tezos' community using the Athens protocol from the winning proposal," said Andrew Paulicek - founder of Tezos baking service HappyTezos - to CoinDesk.