By
Mayowa Adebajo
December 14th, 2023
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 (ICO) in 2017, the Tezos blockchain officially launched last September. It was valued at over $1 billion at the time and presently sits at roughly $414.5 million in market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap.
Nevertheless, due to some corporate governance disputes, the completion of the project was postponed.
At the time of writing, Tezos was rising by 5% on the hourly charts, and by 18,73% on the 24-hour spectrum. The cryptocurrency had a 24-hour trading volume at $5.3 million. A majority of the coin’s trading volume was held by UEX and BitMax, two popular cryptocurrency exchanges. UEX contributed to 27.7% of the total XTZ trade, while BitMax posted a trading volume of $1.190 million.
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.
Having gathered a total of 25,855 community votes, Athens A won the majority of bids from bakers, the equivalent to miners on a traditional proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, with a total of 18,181 votes.
Athens A is set to introduce two different backward-incompatible changes to the network.
First, computation limits per block, also called gas limits, will be increased on the Tezos blockchain to allow for larger transaction throughput.
Awa Sun Yin, founder of Cryptium Labs, the second most popular baker on Tezos, explained:
“If the gas limit is increased, it would enable more computation in blocks and operations, meaning that not only the maximum of transactions per block could increase, but also the complexity of the transactions.”
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.
We Are in The Middle of Proving That Governance is Working
Cryptocurrency trader and analyst Luke Martin (a.k.a. Venture Coinist) started the debate around Tezos outside of its community by tweeting, “Why is everyone talking about Tezos?”
Why is everyone talking about Tezos?
— Luke Martin (@VentureCoinist) March 20, 2019
Twitter user Blindripper (@Blindripper85) reminded the relevance of the Tezos Athens proposal saying:
“We are also in the middle of proving that our governance is working.”
Eugene Loza, a popular trader on the TradingView platform, known as EXCAVO, also claims he’s bullish on Tezos:
“After we found the bottom, the Tezos began to grow, now it looks very bullish.”
Bifti and Mainframe Announced Partnership With Tezos
It was speculated by some users that the price rise was owing to the coin’s addition to the Bitfi wallet. Bitfi’s official handle had tweeted:
Due to popular demand, we are adding Tezos (XTZ). This is a very important smart contracts platform that delivers features that others cannot, like formal verification. #Tezos #XTZ pic.twitter.com/pHwXRVCD4p
— hgtp://Bitfi (@TheBitfi) March 18, 2019
Also, Mick Hagen, Founder and CEO of Mainframe confirmed:
“We’re witnessing an explosion of developer skills.The blockchain community has turned towards building, and over the next several months with support from Tezos Commons, we’ll host events around the world focused on challenging those developer skills.
Mainframe and Tezos share the core commitment to advance blockchain development and adoption. With the Tezos Foundation (sister organization of Tezos Commons) announcing plans to train 1,000 developers in 2019, we’re eager to work side by side to accelerate developer experience building dapps using the Mainframe platform.”
The voting process seems to be going well. Jacob Arluck, developer at Tocqueville Group, a company working to advance the Tezos ecosystem said:
“Voting participation rate (including Tezos Foundation’s non-vote) has surpassed 80%, the minimum quorum for the next voting period!”
On-chain governance is all the rage. Tezos requires a multi-stage process and maximizes coin holder engagement to ensure the protocol moves in the direction its holders want. One aspect of the Athens upgrade that has seen some pushback is the elimination of “spendable contracts.”
The change means that contract holders can no longer create contracts allowing them to move money out without checks and balances in place.