Happy New Years, Tezos Community!

Hello Tezos community, and Happy New Year.

As we step into the first days of January, we wanted to begin 2026 by wishing everyone across the Tezos ecosystem a warm and genuine Happy New Year. Whether you are easing out of the holidays or slowly getting back into the rhythm of work, we hope the year ahead brings clarity, creativity, and steady momentum.

This edition of The Baking Sheet is a tribute to the Tezos community itself. Builders, artists, bakers, researchers, gamers, operators, and everyday users all played a part in shaping the year we just closed. Not every moment made headlines, but the consistency, care, and long-term thinking that define this ecosystem were on display throughout the year.

Looking ahead, Tezos enters 2026 with real momentum and a strong sense of direction. Governance continued to do what it is designed to do. Upgrades moved forward without disruption. Layer 1 and Etherlink kept progressing in practical, measurable ways. Tokenization, gaming, payments, and creative work all found room to grow without losing sight of the network’s core values.

As 2026 begins, the foundations feel solid. The protocol roadmap remains focused on performance and usability. Etherlink is maturing into a serious execution layer. Most importantly, the culture of participation and thoughtful discussion that sets Tezos apart is still very much alive.

For this holiday week, we are keeping things intentionally simple. Regular updates, headlines, and ecosystem news will ramp up next week as the year properly gets underway. For now, we wanted to pause, say thank you, and start the year by recognizing the people who make Tezos what it is.

Thank you for reading, for building, for creating, and for showing up. Here’s to a great start to 2026 and to what the Tezos community continues to build together in the year ahead.

Tallinn Advances to Adoption Phase

As the year turns, Tezos governance closes out 2025 with a clear signal of confidence. Tallinn has officially cleared quorum with a full 100 percent supermajority, and is now on track to move into the Adoption phase of the governance cycle in nine days. With participation thresholds met and support locked in, the proposal is entering its final stretch.

If you need a quick refresher on what Tallinn brings to Tezos, here is what is on deck.

Six-second block time
Tallinn continues the performance path established by Paris and Quebec. Layer 1 block time is reduced again, moving from 8 seconds to 6. The result is immediately noticeable across the network.

• Smoother transactions on Layer 1

• 12-second finality

• Faster data availability for Etherlink and other Layer 2s

• Quicker bridging and interchain operations

Crucially, this improvement does not raise hardware requirements for bakers. Accessibility remains intact, and decentralization stays protected.

All bakers attest every block once tz4 adoption passes 50 percent
The Seoul upgrade introduced BLS aggregation. Tallinn builds on that foundation by enabling all bakers to attest in every block once tz4 adoption crosses the halfway mark.

This shift delivers several long-term benefits.

• Stronger network security

• Predictable attestation rewards

• Lower load on nodes

• A simpler and more efficient consensus path

• Headroom for even shorter block times in future upgrades

Since Ledger devices cannot sign BLS fast enough, bakers preparing for tz4 are encouraged to use alternatives such as the Tezos RPi BLS Signer, TezSign, or Signatory.

Address Indexing Registry
Tallinn also introduces a global Address Indexing Registry. Instead of storing the same addresses repeatedly, each address is stored once and referenced by a compact numeric ID. For large ledgers and NFT collections, this can reduce storage needs by 50 to 100 times.

The impact is broad.

• Lower contract storage costs

• Less on-chain duplication

• Higher throughput

• Slower long-term growth of network storage

This registry will also be available on Tezlink, extending the same efficiency gains to Michelson-based Layer 2 applications.

With voting already secured, you can follow the progress in real-time at Tezos Agora.

This week on TezTalks Radio, host Brandon Langston is joined by Islam, Community Manager at Trilitech, for a thoughtful conversation about responsibility, judgment, and the emotional reality of working closely with people.

Before entering the Tezos ecosystem, Islam seriously considered a career in medicine. That interest in care, responsibility, and human impact never disappeared. It simply found a different place to live. In this episode, we explore how those values translate into community work, where decisions matter, clarity is essential, and there is rarely a script to follow.

In this episode, we explore:

• What drew Islam toward medicine and what stayed with him after choosing a different path

• How responsibility shows up in community roles without formal authority

• The parallels between medical clarity and careful communication

• How judgment is formed when rules alone are not enough

• What community experiments reveal, even when they fall short

• The emotional weight of working closely with people at scale

• Lessons drawn from long-term loyalty and expectation

• What good engagement actually looks like from the community side

• One misconception about community-facing roles that causes the most friction

• What Islam hopes his work contributes to over time, beyond metrics

Now streaming on YouTube.