Hassan Maishera
The Tezos team announced via X on Tuesday that the Tezos protocol has been successfully upgraded, with no fork or disruption to the network, following an on-chain governance process which saw broad participation from bakers (validators) and other community members.
Developed by Nomadic Labs, Trilitech, and Functori, Ushuaia is Tezos’ 21st protocol upgrade – proposed, adopted, and seamlessly activated through on-chain governance by network stakeholders.
Following the activation of the Ushuaia upgrade on mainnet, Data Availability Layer (DAL) bandwidth has increased to 10MB/s, opening the door for applications on Tezos to move 15x more data than before.
Tezos can now support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second without data publication becoming a bottleneck, making it well suited for games, high-frequency DeFi, and other data-intensive applications. Rather than being a hardware-driven leap, the increase comes from a combination of software optimizations and updated protocol parameters.
Security remains unchanged; the same attestation thresholds, rewards, and redundancy factors apply, meaning decentralization isn't being traded for throughput. Ushuaia also makes DAL attestation dynamic, so operations like fast withdrawals on Etherlink (Tezos EVM), are now confirmed noticeably faster.
The Ushuaia protocol code also includes further features that have not been activated on mainnet, but are now available on testnet for community assessment and feedback ahead of potential activation in a later protocol upgrade.
These include the introduction of quantum-resistant user keys via the NIST-standardized ML-DSA-44 post-quantum signature scheme. While this feature remains on testnet for now, its introduction marks an early first step towards quantum readiness, well before any real threat materializes.
Also coming to testnet with Ushuaia is enshrined liquid staking, a mechanism enabling users to deposit XTZ into a protocol-recognized contract and receive sTEZ, an FA2.1 token that increases in value relative to XTZ, as staking rewards accrue. It lets users keep funds liquid while participating in staking, without relying on centralized third parties.
The accrual model also simplifies accounting and DeFi integration. The feature is still being developed in cooperation with the broader Tezos community, and mainnet activation is being targeted for a future protocol upgrade.
Tezos is a blockchain platform that supports smart contracts and dapps based on the idea of a digital commonwealth, in which governance is democratized in an efficient and sustainable manner to avoid costly hard-fork scenarios.
XTZ is down 1.2% in the last 24 hours and is currently trading at $0.2047 per coin.
