While everyone is getting excited about Bitcoin likely succeeding in its first minor upgrade in four years with Taproot, the self-amending blockchain Tezos has already deployed its sixth consecutive protocol upgrade and the second in just three months.
Tezos addresses the key barriers facing blockchain adoption to date, namely: smart contract safety, long-term upgradeability and open participation. Its latest upgrade, Florence, arrives just three months after the Edo update, which added a convenient mechanism for smart contracts to grant portable permissions to other smart contracts or to issue tokens, and an adoption period to ease upgrade transitions, among other improvements.
At the Nexus of the Crypto Renaissance
At a time when artists, programmers, scientists, entertainers, architects and brands from all over the world are discovering the benefits of blockchain technology, Tezos sees the Florence protocol upgrade very much at the core of this creative melting pot.
Indeed, Florence is going live as Tezos network activity has surpassed 1 million contract calls per month, including NFT-focused projects like Hic et Nunc and Kalamint, which are helping to fuel the growth of artists from all genres in discovering an alternative for their NFT needs, as part of a continually evolving Tezos ecosystem.
Discovering Florence
Florence represents the latest set of smoothly incorporated improvements, showcasing the careful design, governance model and self-amending mechanism of Tezos, while keeping pace with the rapid expansion of the activity on the network following smart contract viability, to ensure it remains optimized, reliable and full-featured.
The Florence proposal resulted from a development collaboration by Nomadic Labs, Metastate, Marigold, DaiLambda and Tarides, reaching quorum with 100% approval for the sixth Tezos protocol upgrade, successfully deployed via on-chain community governance. Though Florence also introduces several bug fixes and smaller improvements, the most important changes focus on increasing the maximum operation size of smart contracts, optimizing gas consumption, introducing depth-first execution ordering and eliminating test chain activation.
Regarding operation size, the maximum 16kB has doubled to 32kB with Florence, among other things doubling the maximum size of a smart contract, meaning that developers can create more complicated applications than were previously possible.
With Florence, functionally complex smart contracts can now be run more economically at a lower gas consumption cost thanks to increasing the efficiency of gas computation in the latest protocol upgrade.
Florence also makes life easier for developers to write complicated smart contracts that don’t behave unexpectedly. Florence achieves this by changing the applied order of the inter-contract calls of smart contracts to depth-first execution ordering, allowing for far more intuitive application development.
Finally, of the more important changes, Florence introduces a more reliable amendment process. Previously, a test chain would be spun up during the testing period between voting periods. In practice, this was unnecessarily complicated and never used, resulting in reliability problems for node operators. So, by deactivating this test chain feature in the protocol while retaining the testing period as a cool-down period between votes, the amendment process for the protocol is significantly streamlined.
Following on from Florence, several development organizations in the Tezos ecosystem will continue to collaborate in submitting protocol upgrade proposals every few months.