Tezos Activates ‘Mumbai’ Upgrade Enabling More Than a Million Transactions Per Second

Tezos, a pioneering blockchain for Proof-of-Stake consensus and on-chain governance, has activated Mumbai, its thirteenth core protocol upgrade. The Mumbai upgrade introduces Smart Rollups, a new Layer 2 scaling solution built directly into the protocol, which puts Tezos at the forefront of optimistic rollup technology.

Smart Rollups enable decentralized applications (dApps) to benefit from their own dedicated hardware resources in order to process a high amount of transactions, while the integrity and security of the Smart Rollup is guaranteed by the Tezos main chain, or Layer 1.

Due to this approach, the Tezos ecosystem will be able to surpass the milestone of one million transactions per second in 2023 without sacrificing decentralization.

Secure, flexible, developer friendly

Smart Rollups come with state-of-the-art technical features, namely:

• Fully decentralized and open interactive fraud proofs guarantee rollup security and integrity, provided there is at least one honest participant in the rollup validation.
• A WebAssembly (WASM) execution environment allows for flexible development and deployment of a wide range of decentralized applications. Developers can now use general purpose programming languages such as Rust, C, and C++ to build applications ranging from tailor-made business solutions to public open platforms, such as an EVM-compatible chain on top of Tezos.
• Advanced rollup features simplify interactions such as broadcasting from Layer 1 to all rollups, calling Layer 1 smart contracts from Layer 2, or transferring assets across layers.
• New data availability solutions are possible, as Smart Rollups support custom data channels for interfacing with data providers external to the Tezos blockchain.

Lower latency, faster blockchain

Beyond rollups, Mumbai also introduces improvements to Tezos’ Layer 1. Block time is reduced from 30 to 15 seconds, which is made possible with so-called Pipelined validation. This change reduces network latency and provides a smoother user experience overall.

The protocol upgrade also includes updates to previously existing features, such as Tickets, which become more flexible by allowing direct transfers between users.

Evolution driven by the community

As with every Tezos upgrade, Mumbai has been validated and approved by the community through the Tezos blockchain's on-chain governance process.

The activation of Mumbai marks the culmination of a months-long collaboration between developers teams and the broader Tezos community.

Experts from Nomadic Labs,Marigold, TriliTech, Oxhead Alpha, Tarides, DaiLambda, and Functori have contributed to this update, which unveils a new era of scalability and opens the door for exciting new applications to be deployed on Tezos blockchain.