Faster Blocks, Improved Staking, Stronger Economics: Quebec is Live!

On January 20, 2025, at block #7,692,289, the Tezos blockchain successfully activated the Quebec protocol upgrade, marking the 17th major milestone in Tezos’ evolution.

Developed collaboratively by Nomadic Labs, TriliTech, and Functori, this upgrade introduces key enhancements that strengthen Tezos’ performance, staking system, and economic design.

The highlights #

Faster blocks: The block time for layer 1 transactions is reduced from 10 to 8 seconds, meaning that transactions are included by the network faster. This also reduces transaction finality to just 16 seconds, which is notably faster than Ethereum’s layer 1 (~15 minutes) and is snapping at the heels of Solana (~13 seconds).

Improved staking: Bakers can now accept up to 9x their own stake from external stakers, up from the previous 5x limit. This change accommodates growing demand for staking capacity while still mitigating the risk of stake concentration among a few large bakers. Additionally, staking is now an even more attractive option compared to delegation, yielding 3x the rewards vs. delegation.

Stronger economics: The Quebec protocol refines the ‘Adaptive Issuance’ mechanism that automatically balances staking rewards with the network’s security needs. The aim is to minimize tez inflation, and this change adjusts the upper limit for tez issuance when staking is relatively close to the target of 50%, ensuring that staking incentives are always proportional to the security benefits.

For a deeper dive, check out Nomadic Labs’ blog post.

Promoting a healthy, decentralized ecosystem #

The 8-second block time was implemented only after applying a rigorous testing methodology, also used in previous upgrades, to ensure the network’s stability and inclusivity.

Importantly, the change does not affect the hardware requirements for bakers, ensuring that community members can continue participating in consensus with affordable infrastructure, even with a Raspberry Pi!

It is the latest in a series of block time reductions, and further reductions are planned.

Raising the external stake limit, a frequent community request, reflects a commitment to supporting a strong and decentralized baker ecosystem as the network grows and demand for staking increases.

And finally, the Adaptive Issuance refinements in Quebec ensure that staking incentives are optimally balanced with long-term healthy economics. The goal is a secure network, but with minimal inflation, which is good for liquidity and for making tez more attractive to use in DeFi and in layer 2 solutions.

Tezos governance in action #

The activation of Quebec demonstrates the strength of Tezos’ governance process, where upgrades are debated, refined, and finally approved through a decentralized, on-chain mechanism.

We are grateful for the broad involvement, as this ensures high legitimacy for each protocol upgrade, benefiting the entire ecosystem.

Meanwhile, the community conversation about the next upgrade, ‘R’, has already started. It builds on the foundation laid in recent protocol upgrades, and represents another step toward the high-performance vision of Tezos X.

Stay tuned!