Tezos Blockchain Activates News May 30, 2019 May 30, 2019 The Tezos blockchain has officially been upgraded. In a first for Tezos, two separate backwards-incompatible changes have been activated on the network after three months of on-chain voting by stakeholders. The Tezos self-amendment process which began for this first time back in February came to a close late Wednesday with the successful activation of an upgrade proposal, dubbed Athens A, just after 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Proposed by a Tezos developer group called Nomadic Labs, Athens A reduces the minimum amount of tokens called rolls required for a user to become a baker on the network from 10,000 XTZ to 8,000 XTZ. Bakers are the equivalent to miners on a proof-of-work blockchain and are tasked with responsibilities such as verifying transactions and creating new blocks. “The reduction will result in a bigger amount of XTZ staked,” emphasized CMO of Everstake – a staking-as-a-service provider on Tezos – Alexandr Kerya to CoinDesk. “Now if a baker has 16k, only 10k is staking while after the upgrade the baker will have 2 rolls engaged in staking. There will be fewer ‘leftovers’ so to speak which is particularly important for small bakers.” Athens A additionally increases computation limits on Tezos blocks to allow for larger transaction throughput.
