By
Mayowa Adebajo
December 14th, 2023
The introduction of TORUs allows the Tezos blockchain an opportunity for long-term growth and very high-throughput use cases on the blockchain.
Nomadic Labs, the leading developer of Tezos blockchain, has submitted their proposal for the network’s 10th upgrade Jakarta. The latest upgrade will introduce rollup scalability solutions, implement various improvements to its smart contract, and solve the issues currently affecting the growth of the Tezos blockchain.
Tezos Blockchain Set to Launch Its 10th Upgrade – Jakarta
On April 1, Nomadic Labs announced the launch of Ithaca 2, the ninth major upgrade on the Tezos blockchain, and less than a month later, they’re already voting on their tenth upgrade, Jakarta, in line with the blockchain’s regular upgrades. Additionally, users will be able to test the latest upgrades on the Jakartanet, the testnet version of Jakarta, in the coming days, a statement from Nomadic Labs reads.
First, the Jakarta upgrade will introduce the first scaling solutions on Tezos, in a bid to boost transaction speed and finality on the blockchain. The Transaction Optimistic Rollups (or TORUs) are proposed to be added with the launch of Jakarta, which will be an experimental implementation of optimistic rollups on Tezos. Similar to optimistic rollups on Ethereum, TORUs will allow the exchange of assets but not the execution of smart contracts.
The introduction of TORUs allows the Tezos blockchain an opportunity for long-term growth and very high-throughput use cases on the blockchain. Unlike optimistic rollups on Ethereum (e.g. Arbitrum), the TORUs will not be implemented as smart contracts but rather natively in the economic protocol. This allows users on Tezos to implement more efficient, expressive, and scalable solutions.
The Jakarta upgrade also introduces the ‘Liquidity Baking Toggle Vote’, which replaces the ‘ Liquidity Baking Escape Hatch’. The toggle vote mechanism allows bakers to vote “On”, “Off”, or “Pass” to vote for the Liquidity Baking subsidy being turned on, off or abstain respectively. Additionally, the new upgrade introduces a threshold for the deactivation of the subsidy. 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, the statement further read.
Thirdly, Jakarta introduces ticket hardening. Tickets on Tezos are a way for smart contracts to authenticate data with respect to a Tezos address. These provide users with a first-class notion of ownership in the Tezos address. With the latest upgrade, users can track the ownership of these tickets, which provides extra protection against forging them and facilitates TORUs that use tickets to represent assets on the main chain.
Other major upgrades include a solution for a design flaw in the existing integration of Sapling transactions into Michelson smart contracts. This upgrade will protect the unshielded tez from any manipulation. Finally, the Jakarta upgrade also implements various improvements to the safety and performance of the Michelson interpreter.
Rapid Upgrade System on Tezos Blockchain
Recently, Tezos introduced its new Tenderbake consensus mechanism as part of their Ithaca 2upgrade, which enables lower block times and improves latency and finality of transactions. As mentioned above, all this came to life in less than a month. Tezos has been on a roll with the upgrades, which is not common on decentralized networks.
Other chains take a long time to introduce upgrades on their platform, either due to community squabbles or development inefficiency. Tezos solves this issue by implementing a ‘self-amending’ protocol that only needs the community’s vote to be implemented. The superior on-chain governance on Tezos makes it easy for the blockchain to implement upgrades through popular voting, integrating the new updates that are selected, and compensating the developers who proposed them.