Tezos has successfully activated Rio, its 18th protocol upgrade, marking another milestone in the blockchainâs Tezos X roadmap.Â
The upgrade was approved through the networkâs on-chain governance process, with participation from validators and community members, and aims to enhance staking flexibility, support growth on Layer 2, and strengthen the networkâs validator framework.
A key feature of the Rio upgrade is a reduction in the Tezosâ (XTZ) cycle lengthâfrom approximately three days to just one, according to a note shared with crypto.news.Â
This change significantly shortens the time users must wait when moving funds between staking and other network activities, such as interacting with decentralized applications.
The shorter cycle is expected to improve user experience across Web3 services by making staking more accessible and responsive. Future upgrades may further reduce unstaking wait times, according to protocol developers.
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DAL and scalability
Rio also advances the adoption of the Tezos Data Availability Layer (DAL), first introduced on mainnet with the Paris upgrade in 2024.Â
The DAL is designed to improve scalability by increasing the volume of transaction data that can be published on-chain by up to 4,000 times, while reducing the costs for rollup-based applications like Etherlink.Â
With Rio, the protocol now allocates 10% of baking rewards to bakers participating in DAL, creating a direct incentive to support L2 scaling.
To improve network reliability, Rio introduces stricter inactivity thresholds for bakers. Under the new rules, bakers who remain unresponsive for more than two days are marked inactive and temporarily lose their consensus rights.Â
This measure is designed to reduce the risk of slowdowns and increase the networkâs overall resilience.
The upgrade was developed collaboratively by Nomadic Labs, Trilitech, and Functori, and is part of Tezosâ ongoing approach to self-amending upgrades and community-led governance.Â
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Ethereumâs next major upgrade, Pectra, is set for activation in early May 2025, bringing changes aimed at boosting scalability, improving user experience, and enhancing validator efficiency, according to Nansen.Â
Combining improvements to the execution and consensus layers, the upgrade builds on previous milestones, such as Shanghai and Dencun, according to Nansen analysis.Â
Pectra doubles the blob data capacity per block from three to six, with a maximum of nine, allowing Layer-2 rollups to post more transaction data at lower costs.
At the same time, the gas cost for traditional calldata will increase, nudging developers toward blob usage to support Ethereumâs (ETH) long-term scalability path.
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Streamlined functionality
Validator operations are also being streamlined. EIP-7251 raises the maximum stake per validator from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, allowing larger stakers to consolidate. Deposits and exits are now fully handled on-chain, cutting activation time from 12 hours to just 13 minutes, and simplifying withdrawals via regular transactions.
From a usability standpoint, EIP-7702 introduces temporary smart contract functionality to externally owned accounts. This enables users to bundle actions, use custom signatures, or sponsor gas fees without converting wallets into smart contracts.
Additional upgrades include lower-cost BLS cryptography support, extended block history for light clients, and the first phase of the EVM Object Format for cleaner smart contract coding.
While not a radical overhaul, Pectra is expected to improve Layer-2 network performance, ease DeFi onboarding, and support more seamless interactions across dApps. Adoption will depend on wallet providers and developers, but the infrastructure changes are already in place.
Ethereum developers have confirmed a hard fork for the first week of May, with no action required from end users.
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