This past weekend, the Tezos blockchain successfully upgraded by adopting Edo at block #1,343,489, making it the fifth Tezos upgrade in the last two years. Developed by Nomadic Labs, Marigold, DaiLambda, and Metastate, Edo is the most ambitious and significant Tezos upgrade to date.
Edo adds Sapling, Tickets, a new “Adoption Period” to the upgrade process, minor bug fixes, and some improvements to performance and gas consumption.
Sapling is a protocol originally developed by the Electric Coin Company. Edo allows smart contract developers to easily integrate Sapling into their smart contracts, enabling new types of applications such as voting or supporting asset transactions with selective disclosures.
Tickets are another valuable enhancement to Tezos. Tickets are a convenient mechanism for smart contracts to grant portable permissions to other smart contracts or to issue tokens. While it’s possible to achieve this with existing programming patterns, tickets make it much easier for developers to write secure and composable contracts.
Another improvement in Edo is the addition of the Adoption Period to the Tezos upgrade process. Up until now, upgrades were activated on-chain one block after voting ends, which is only approximately 60 seconds. This presents a challenge to many Tezos bakers (also known as validators), indexers, and other users of the network who need to ensure that their nodes smoothly transition to the new protocol.
Instead of four periods of eight cycles, the Tezos upgrade process now has five periods of five cycles. This new fifth period, the Adoption Period, will be a five-cycle (approximately two weeks) buffer between the approval of the new upgrade and the adoption of the said upgrade. This process will help ensure seamless upgrade transitions for all users.
Edo continues the movement of adding upgrades to Tezos at regular intervals. A new upgrade proposal, Florence, is expected to be introduced in the coming weeks; which will continue the Tezos community’s record of smoothly incorporating tangible technological improvements into the blockchain.
