Tezos Considers One Of Its Biggest Upgrade Proposals Yet, Jakarta

Tezos blockchain, one of the earliest proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, has received the latest proposal for its protocol upgrade.

The Jakarta proposal upgrade is the 10th major upgrade on Tezos aiming to bring major updates to the blockchain’s economic protocol and introduce several minor improvements on the platform. 

Named after Indonesia’s capital city, the Jakarta upgrade proposal introduces transaction optimistic rollups as scalability solutions, develops a safer Sapling integration, introduces toggle voting for liquidity baking subsidies, and the tracking of ‘tickets’ on the Tezos protocol.

According to a Nomadic Labs post, the Jakarta proposal will launch its testnet, Jakartanet, in the coming days with bakers, developers, indexers, and other users welcomed to use the platform before voting. 

Tezos blockchain’s 10th major upgrade proposal

Over the past few years, Tezos has welcomed constant upgrades and updates at the protocol level in a bid to expand the Tezos’ DApp ecosystem.

The previous nine major upgrades have decreased the transaction times and reduced the gas costs, giving builders more opportunities to develop atop the Tezos blockchain. This has led to increased user adoption and value growth in its ecosystem, with the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) markets on Tezos doubling in value over the past year. 

The Jakarta upgrade proposes the introduction of Transaction Optimistic Rollups (TORUs), which are a layer 2 scalability solution.

These rollups enable higher transaction throughput (TPS) by moving the validation of transactions away from the main blockchain to a ‘Layer 2’ hence lightening the mempool on the main chain.

The TORUs will be an experimental feature that will allow the fast exchange of tokens and added efficiency in other functionalities.  

To optimize the notion of ownership on the Tezos protocol, the Jakarta upgrade introduces ‘ticket hardening’, a mechanism for explicitly tracking ownership of tickets.

Tickets are a way for smart contracts to authenticate data with respect to a Tezos address. Now, users can explicitly track ownership of their tickets on the platform with the new upgrades.

This will boost the security of tickets, providing extra protection against forging them and facilitating layer 2 solutions that use tickets to represent assets on the main chain such as TORUs. 

Redefining the Liquidity baking subsidy

For every block ‘baked’ (mined) in the Tezos blockchain, a small amount of $tez (subsidy) is minted and credited to the CPMM contract, which is used as incentives for the bakers on the network.

As a safety precaution, this subsidy expires automatically at a given level called the liquidity baking sunset level. Tezos holders can then vote by staking their tokens on whether to keep the subsidy or remove it, in a process previously labelled as the “Liquidity Baking Escape Hatch”.

The latest upgrade renames the process to the “Liquidity Baking Toggle Vote”, adding an extra option for voters. The options are now “On”, to vote for the Liquidity Baking subsidy being turned on, and “Off”, to vote for the subsidy to be turned off, and a new “Pass” option to abstain.

Another change is that if the threshold for deactivation is reached, the deactivation of the subsidy is no longer permanent. If the proportion of bakers voting “On” later increases back over the threshold, the subsidy can be restarted.

Finally, the Jakarta protocol upgrade proposal also redefines the computation of the delegates’ voting power in the self-amendment process.

If implemented, the delegates’ voting power will be defined directly by the delegates’ stake rather than the rolls. However, the minimum stake requires to be assigned voting rights remains at 6,000 $tez.