Learn More about Proposed 11th Tezos Protocol Upgrade: Kathmandu
The tenth upgrade to Tezos is almost deployed, and what comes after Jakarta? Kathmandu, that's what.
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The tenth upgrade to Tezos is almost live, and what comes after Jakarta? Kathmandu, that’s what. With Jakarta nearing activation, developer teams at , Marigold, TriliTech, Oxhead Alpha, Tarides, DaiLambda, Functori and Tweag are already working on the eleventh Tezos upgrade, Kathmandu.
We’ve excerpted the key components of the proposed Kathmandu upgrade (as they stand right now) below, and you can read the full breakdown by Nomadic Labs here. The full article also includes more detail about how Kathmandu will usher in a new ‘continuous development’ approach to the protocol development process, based on developer feedback, which is aimed at reducing friction around upgrades.
First steps towards pipelined block validation
The validation Pipelining project aims to streamline the block validation process, in order to reduce the number of times they need to be applied (that is, executed) across the Tezos Layer 1 network. It also aims to propagate blocks before fully applying them, but after having fastly validated a set of preconditions on the block and its operation payload which guarantees their correctness. […]
The Kathmandu protocol proposal will implement first steps in this direction by focusing on disentangling validation and application for manager operations1 inside the Tezos protocol.
Improved randomness using Verifiable Delay Functions
In order to strengthen the Tezos protocol’s distributed randomness generation mechanism, we propose integrating Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs). These are novel cryptographic primitives that allow a verifier to quickly assert that a value was computed as a result of an expensive computation. Appending a VDF phase after our current RANDAO scheme adds an extra layer of security to the protocol’s random seeds.
Event logging in Tezos smart contracts
The Kathmandu protocol proposal will provide support for Tezos smart contracts to cheaply emit on-chain events via statically typed event data attachments. This new feature will enable DApp developers to send publicly visible on-chain messages in order to trigger effects in off-chain applications.
Support for permanent test networks
The Kathmandu protocol proposal will also include a new testnet-specific governance mechanism necessary to support a permanent test network, Ghostnet.
For any chain other than Tezos Mainnet, this mechanism lets the chain originator designate a special account, that can upgrade the protocol unilaterally with a new protocol proposal. Instead of going through the normal governance election cycles, the chain will upgrade straight away to the new protocol.
The full contents of the Kathmandu proposal are expected to be finalized soon, and as with previous upgrades, this will be followed by the creation of a dedicated test network, Kathmandunet.