Tezos Successfully Completes Seventh Forkless, Disruption Free Network Upgrade, Granada

• The seventh upgrade on Tezos, Granada, cuts block times in half, decreases smart contract gas consumption by 3-6x, and introduces liquidity baking. 

Granada marks the seventh successful upgrade on the Tezos blockchain and the third to occur this year alone. The Tezos network has experienced substantial growth this year with activity up 1,200 percent. The trend is clear, more developers and organizations are choosing Tezos because of its forkless, disruption free upgrades made possible by time-tested on-chain governance.

At Tezos’ last upgrade in May, Florence, contract calls began eclipsing the 1 million per month mark. That growth has only continued; in July, there were over 2.5 million contract calls on Tezos. The Tezos network recently surpassed 10 million contract calls, with 5 million coming in the first 3 years and over 5 million just in the past 8 weeks. Granada continues the momentum with several new features and optimizations, including:

Faster Finality: Granada replaces the previous consensus algorithm, Emmy+, with Emmy*. Emmy* cuts block times in half from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. Granada’s faster finality paves the way for Tezos’ transition to a new consensus algorithm, Tenderbake. Tenderbake aims to transition Tezos from a Nakamoto-style consensus algorithm to a BFT-style (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus algorithm and significantly speed up finality. Tenderbake is expected to be part of the eighth Tezos network upgrade and is based on the Cosmos consensus, Tendermint.

Smart Contract Gas Reduction: Granada will drastically reduce gas consumption for smart contracts. Consumption will be reduced by an average factor of 3 to 6 times. This reduction in gas consumption, the latest in a series of gas efficiency upgrades which began with Delphi, will enable developers to deploy richer and more complex applications on Tezos at reasonable, real-world cost.

Liquidity Baking: Liquidity baking is an experiment to test whether decentralised networks can use incentives to create liquidity. Liquidity baking attempts to do this on the Tezos blockchain, by introducing an incentive for users to provide liquidity between tez (XTZ) and tzBTC, a wrapped bitcoin on Tezos. It all happens verifiably, through a smart contract where liquidity providers pool tez and tzBTC. This allows them to claim a small subsidy: 2.5 tez, minted by the network every 30 seconds, in every block.

Tezos Continues to Rapidly Evolve and Grow

Granada is live less than three months after the last upgrade, Florence, which brought a bevy of sought-after features including doubling the size of maximum operations (from 16kB to 32kB), gas reductions in smart contract execution, and streamlined the amendment process by deactivating unused Test Chain in the Economic Protocol. Tezos network upgrades are supported by a global team of developers, the Tezos community, bakers, and critical infrastructure teams at Nomadic Labs, DaiLambda, Marigold, Tarides, and Oxhead Alpha.

The Tezos position paper, published in 2014, pioneered the use of governance mechanisms and incentives on a blockchain to provide for public goods that go beyond securing the network. This governance mechanism minimizes disruptions while offering regular upgradability and enhanced functionality over time. Tezos is able to adopt the best features of other blockchain protocols and adopt continuous improvements without the need to rely on hard forks. By offering an on-chain mechanism to amend its network and seamlessly deploy upgrades, Tezos is able to stay ahead of the industry trends and capabilities.

Granada is named after the Spanish city in the autonomous Andalusian region. Tezos network upgrades are named after historic cities that correspond with where the upgrade falls sequentially in the alphabet (Athens, Babylon, Carthage, etc.).