Activating the Rollup Booster: A Call to the Tezos Community

The Data Availability Layer (DAL) represents a transformative step for the Tezos ecosystem.

Introduced with the Paris protocol upgrade, the DAL is essential for scaling rollups and realizing the proposed Tezos X roadmap — a vision for unmatched performance, composability, and interoperability.

Now, activating the DAL requires the collective effort of the Tezos community.

What it does #

The DAL boosts the Tezos network’s bandwidth: the amount of transaction data that can be published on-chain per second.

Bandwidth is currently limited by the capacity of layer 1 blocks. The DAL changes this, enabling an instant 20x improvement for layer 2 solutions such as rollups. Within two years, the target is a 4000x improvement, or 100MB/s.

It’s worth pointing out that the DAL’s security remains guaranteed by layer 1, a property that makes Tezos stand out in the industry. For more details on this, check out Nomadic Labs’ blog post.

The benefits #

The DAL doesn’t just remove a major scaling bottleneck for rollups; it also makes them much cheaper to run.

A good example is Etherlink, the Smart Rollup-powered EVM environment on Tezos. It’s designed to integrate with the DAL, enabling a reduction of the (already low) cost of publishing transactions.

Overall, the DAL solidifies Tezos’ position as a blockchain with industry-leading technology. For example, compared to Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, the Tezos DAL offers a more scalable solution.

A community push to 67% #

The DAL requires at least 67% of the Tezos stake to run DAL nodes. While it’s up to bakers to operate these nodes, the broader Tezos community can help make it happen.

As a community member, you can reach out to your baker and encourage them to run a DAL node, perhaps by highlighting the DAL’s importance for scaling and its benefits for the ecosystem. Bakers may also appreciate learning that economic incentives are likely to be proposed in future upgrades.

So bakers, lead the way and run a DAL node, and community members, rally your bakers to join the effort. Together, we can activate the rollup booster and take a major step on the road to Tezos X!