Tezos (XTZ) Completes its Ithaca 2 Upgrade. What's Next?This event largely went unnoticed by the media, but Tezos (XTZ) underwent a major upgrade to their protocol as of this week. The upgrade deals mostly with scalability issues - as the oldest Proof-of-Stake system in the market, XTZ arguably one of the most technically advanced blockchain platforms in the world right now.
In the early days of the crypto industry Tezos decided to go straight into Proof-of-Stake instead of with Proof-of-Work like the others did. (Technical superiority doesn't always translate into business success but it is worth pointing out that XTZ is already where ETH is moving towards right now.) The recent Ithaca 2 upgrade includes:
- Increased throughput (faster transactions times)
- Lowers requirements for node staking from 8000 Tez to 6000 Tez (roughly 20-24k. ETH node requirements are 100k+)
- Improvements in privacy, security, and better compatibility with zero-knowledge proofs/rollups/sharding methods overall
I do think that Tezos is an underrated project right now since the project has been dealing with real-world use cases in the Proof-of-Stake model that coins like ETH, DOGE, and BTC have yet to face - potentially creating an opportunity for a leap-frogging event to occur.
The chain also has the advantage of having attracted the attention of artist communities around the world (Hic et Nunc, https://TEIA.art, hen.radio), many of whom were gentrified out of ETH's ecosystem due to high gas fees, which shouldn't be underestimated since attracting users is often the hardest thing for platforms to do. This puts Tezos in a very good place in the next few years as the race for #NFTs and metaverse projects starts to ramp up - these products will be judged by their artistic quality, and the platform with the highest concentration of artistic talent will likely win.
Anything could happen so everything is still TBD, but the race may have just gotten much more interesting as new contenders for #Web3 relevance continues to grow.
