Tezos Newest Upgrade Proposal ‘Hangzhou’ Announced

UPDATE: Hangzhou has been accepted by the Tezos community and will activate at the end of cycle 427, on block 1,916,929, at approximately 16:20:22 UTC on December 3rd, 2021.

Tezos, one of the original Proof of Stake blockchains, is one of the few networks with on-chain governance, which allows the network to upgrade itself without a hard fork, today received its newest upgrade proposal from members of the global Tezos community. The proposal, named after Hangzhou, a major global technology and innovation hub located in China’s Zhejiang province, is just the latest in development news from the rapidly growing Tezos ecosystem; the proposal forecasts a new era for Tezos.

At a time when competitors are wafering with upgrades of their own or still figuring out smart contracts, Tezos is seizing the opportunity by demonstrating how a decentralized network can run and upgrade efficiently. The Hangzhou upgrade proposal will help set the stage for an expected 2022 consensus upgrade, Tenderbake, and introduce a number of new technical tools and patches.

Innovation on Tezos at the protocol level has led to the rapid expansion of Tezos’ decentralized application ecosystem. New efficiencies in transaction time and gas consumption from upgrades have made it more practical for builders to develop on Tezos which has led to increased growth of the Tezos community in recent months. Tezos recently eclipsed over 3 million contract calls in August and has seen record DeFi and NFT metrics, putting it on track for hitting 6 million contract calls for the month of September.

This newest upgrade proposal contains several major improvements to the protocol — learn more below:

• Views — Views give the possibility to smart-contracts to read the storage of other smart contracts. This increases the flexibility of contract design, making it easier for them to express common needs.
• Timelock — Timelock allows a smart contract to include a countermeasure against Block Producer Extractable Value.
• Cache — Caching results in faster access, at a lower gas cost, to the data that is accessed regularly. It helps to improve the use of storage at the protocol level, by splitting the data and increasing the overall throughput of Tezos.
• Global Table of Constants — The Global Table of Constants will allow smart contract developers to register Michelson expressions as “constants” and reference them in their contracts. This allows them to create larger and more complex contracts and serve as the foundation for libraries on Tezos.
• Context Flattening — Context flattening will allow future optimisations in order to speed up the processing of blocks and operations.
• Liquidity baking — Extends the sunset period of liquidity baking to correspond to the next upgrade proposal. Without this, the subsidy would halt during the lifespan of this protocol.

No other blockchain has upgraded as many times as Tezos — seven upgrades following last month’s Granada upgrade. More people are choosing Tezos to run their applications today than ever before. Protocol upgrades, made possible by on-chain governance are a significant reason why. The Tezos ecosystem has set the bar in the crypto industry by showcasing how on-chain governance can spur innovation at a rapid pace.

The Hangzhou proposal was jointly developed by Marigold, DaiLambda, Nomadic Labs, Tarides, and Oxhead Alpha.