It’s been a long time since something exciting happened for Tezos. The protocol and its community are preparing for a new upgrade with the code name Mumbai and its massive improvements. What is Mumbai, and how is it going to elevate Tezos?

The biggest upgrade in history

Arthur Breitman called Mumbai the biggest upgrade in Tezos’ short history. The protocol was built around the idea that every aspect of its technology can be decided by stakeholders, who effectively govern Tezos using its liquid proof of stake consensus mechanism.

Therefore, Tezos does not need any form of hard forks, but can rather shift to a new state once consensus is found among voters on a proposal. The current proposal is called Mumbai and according to an official statement from Nomadic Labs, it is ready to go. This sounds promising, but it is worth remembering that the implementation could take a while longer.

Mumbai will activate so-called smart rollups, a technology that will allow Tezos to scale and serve 1 million transactions per second. Smart rollups have been available on testnet for quite some time and will not only be activated but also be improved with Mumbai. Minimal block time will also be reduced by cutting it by half down to 15 seconds. Another great feature is Epoxy, which is introducing validity rollups that serve a very similar purpose to optimistic rollups on Ethereum. Epoxy will be available on testnet and is meant to improve privacy through its second-layer technology.

Tezos is lagging behind

Although Tezos has created its own ecosystem of decentralized financial applications and NFT collections, it is still lagging behind other blockchains in terms of TVL and user adoption. It remains to be seen if smart rollups can become a game-changer.

Scalability has been an issue from the very beginning of Bitcoin, which gave birth to blockchain technology. Tezos does not make an exception, and its technology needs to solve the same trilemma every blockchain has to face. With that being said, providing a reliable and fast blockchain infrastructure with relatively low costs is still a niche. Projects like Solana or Avalanche have improved the industry in this respect, but there is still a solution pending that could really build the foundation for mass adoption.

It remains to be seen if Tezos is going to succeed and scale to 1 million tp/s in the near future. Should this be the case, then the protocol that started with one of the biggest ICOs in history is most likely about to turn some heads in the blockchain space. While analysts are still discussing whether the recent rally in the crypto market is a bull trap or a recovery, Tezos is attempting to build quietly something that could be outstanding.