Tezos Paris upgrade: Faster L2 transactions, lower Fees

Tezos' 16th upgrade went live on mainnet, reducing block finality times to just 10 seconds, to increase L2 scalability in the future.
Tezos' 16th upgrade went live on mainnet, reducing block finality times to just 10 seconds, to increase L2 scalability in the future.

Following the Paris upgrade, Tezos-based layer-2 (L2) scaling solutions could reach a throughput of millions of transactions per second (TPS).

Paris, the 16th upgrade of the Tezos protocol, went live on mainnet on June 5. It aims to make the network faster and more scalable.

One key goal of the upgrade and Tezos’ scalability roadmap was to maintain low transaction fees across the EVM-compatible L2 network Etherlink, including under high network demand.

Following the upgrade, Etherlink is now cheaper than Arbitrum and Optimism, with an improved user experience (UX), according to Arthur Breitman, the co-founder of Tezos. He told Cointelegraph:

“Thanks to the Paris upgrade, Etherlink users will enjoy an improved UX: L2 time to finality will be on par with Arbitrum One and Optimism's, but L1 publication latency will be (even) better.”

Etherlink has a 500 millisecond transaction finality time, with the data posted on the main L1 in approximately 10 seconds. It would take two minutes on Optimism and seven minutes on Arbitrum One.

Despite the discrepancy in finality, Arbitrum One and Optimism remain two of the largest Ethereum L2s by TVL, with the former worth $19.2 billion and the latter $7.8 billion in total value locked (TVL), according to L2Beat.

Top Ethereum L2s by TVL. Source: L2eat

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Tezos’ Data Availability Layer to boost L2 throughput to over one million TPS

Tezos’ newly introduced Data Availability Layer (DAL) is the key feature of the upgrade, aiming to foster more decentralized network participation via more affordable hardware and bandwidth requirements.

The introduction of DAL will enable Tezos’ Smart Rollups to scale to execute millions of TPS in the future.

Tezos rollups have already reached one million TPS in a July 2023 public demonstration through horizontal scaling, according to Breitman. He explained:

“This feat was achieved by exploiting horizontal scaling capabilities (1,000 rollup nodes running in parallel at 1,000 TPS each). The Paris upgrade activates the Data-Availability Layer (DAL) on mainnet, boosting by several orders of magnitude the capacity of Tezos L1 to attest the publication of rollup data.”

The updated TPS data after the Paris upgrade was still unavailable.

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Paris upgrade reduced block times to 10 seconds

The upgrade also reduced block times from 15 to 10 seconds to create faster transaction finality and reduce latencies when performing payments. Faster payment confirmations can also improve user experience across decentralized applications (DApps) built on Tezos.

This new finality has significantly reduced payment latency, according to Tezos’ Breitman.

“This means that transactions on Tezos L1 will be processed and confirmed faster. These improvements have been developed without challenging the network's robustness and security, and they render Tezos L1 more appealing for critical applications requiring fast settlement times.”
How to solve the blockchain trilemma? | Interview with Silvio Micali. Source: Cointelegraph

Creating faster transaction times without sacrificing a network's decentralization and security is one of the cryptocurrency industry's most pressing concerns and is known as the blockchain trilemma.

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