🧧 Happy Lunar New Year

Before we get into upgrades, events, and everything unfolding across the ecosystem, we want to pause for a moment and say something simple.

Happy Lunar New Year to the entire Tezos community!

To everyone building new products, baking blocks, collecting art, shipping code, debating proposals on Agora, organizing meetups, or supporting things behind the scenes, you matter. This network runs because of you.

The Lunar New Year is rooted in renewal, intention, and forward movement. That feels especially fitting for Tezos right now. There’s a steady energy building. New ideas are taking shape. Conversations are turning into action.

So here’s what we’re hoping this year brings:

New ideas that turn into real products.
Partnerships that stretch across borders and time zones.
Governance that stays thoughtful and steady.
Creativity in every form, from art to code to games and finance.
Builders who keep showing up, even on the quiet days.

Tezos has always been global at its core. Different cultures. Different languages. Different paths into the ecosystem. What connects it all is a shared belief in building something that lasts.

Wherever you’re celebrating from, we’re wishing you clarity in your decisions, courage in your work, and good fortune in the year ahead.

Let’s make it count.

Etherlink at ETHDenver

From Lunar New Year celebrations straight to boots on the ground in Colorado, the Tezos ecosystem is moving with purpose.

This week, it’s builder mode.

If you’re at ETHDenver, stop by the Etherlink booth and come say hello.

📍 Booth 510D in Devtopia

Here’s what you’ll find:

• The Proof of Speed challenge. Step up and put your typing skills to the test against Instant Confirmations.

• The fastest participant each day walks away with a mechanical keyboard.

• Fresh merch dropping throughout the week.

• A Uranium.io giveaway is happening right at the booth.

More than anything, this is a chance to see Etherlink’s sub-50ms confirmations in real time. You can feel the difference when something responds instantly. It changes how apps behave and how users experience them.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

The Road to Protocol ‘U’: DAL Bandwidth Set to Increase 15x in Protocol U

If Protocol “U” is laying the groundwork for long-term cryptographic security, it is also unlocking something much more immediate: scale.

Alongside post-quantum preparation, Nomadic Labs previewed a major upgrade to the Data Availability Layer. If approved, DAL usable bandwidth would increase from roughly 0.66 MB/s to 10 MB/s which is a 15x jump.

That shift completes another milestone on the Tezos X roadmap and removes one of the last structural ceilings for high-throughput applications on Etherlink and Tezlink.

Before any transaction can be executed on a rollup, its data has to be published securely and verifiably on Layer 1. Execution may still be the limiting factor today, but data publication can become the bottleneck tomorrow.

At 10 MB per second, the network can publish hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at low cost. That opens the door to:

• Data-intensive games

• High-frequency DeFi systems

• Complex on-chain applications that would previously worry about bandwidth ceilings

• Sustained high-throughput L2 usage without congestion risk

In short, it gives builders room to think bigger.

How the Increase Works

The bandwidth jump does not come from weakening security assumptions. It comes from optimization.

On the software side:

• Shard verification has been batched and parallelized

• Validation now scales efficiently across multiple CPU cores

On the protocol side:

• The number of slots and slot sizes are increased

• Attestation thresholds remain the same

• Reward mechanics remain unchanged

• Redundancy and reconstruction guarantees remain intact

Security and economic incentives stay consistent. Capacity expands.

What Bakers Need to Know

The increased bandwidth comes with modest hardware guidance updates.

For the majority of bakers — those under ~2% of total stake — existing setups remain sufficient.

For larger bakers, especially those in the 5–10% range, moving toward 8-core or 16-core CPUs is recommended to future-proof against peak DAL load.

Importantly:

• No new slashing conditions are introduced

• The only risk of underpowered hardware is partial DAL attestation loss

• That would affect DAL-related rewards only, not core baking safety

This guidance is based on worst-case sustained peak usage scenarios. In normal conditions, most setups will perform comfortably.

The DAL upgrade brings Tezos firmly into the multi-megabyte-per-second era without raising the barrier to participation.

It is a careful balance: ambitious enough to support serious applications, conservative enough to preserve decentralization.

When builders begin pushing throughput limits on Etherlink and Tezlink, the data layer will not be the constraint. We’re excited to see what people can build with the power of scaling and it shows yet again how Tezos is always a few steps ahead of other chains thanks to its governance model.

Last thing on the plate for this week is that Tezlink Shadownet portal is now live, giving builders a simple way to connect, grab test tez, and start experimenting with the Michelson runtime under the Tezos X roadmap.

Getting started takes just a few steps:

• Add the Tezlink Shadownet network to Temple
• Claim test tez from the faucet
• Deploy and interact with Michelson contracts

That’s it. You’re running in a test environment built for sub-second performance.

Tezlink brings Michelson into a faster execution layer while keeping the tools developers already use. You can build with SmartPy or LIGO, connect familiar wallets, and navigate with TzKT. With latency under 500 milliseconds, it feels dramatically more responsive than Layer 1’s six-second block time, while still anchoring back to Tezos L1 for security.

And this is only the beginning.

Atomic composability with Etherlink, shared sequencing, and deeper liquidity access are on the way, opening the door for Michelson and EVM contracts to interact inside the same rollup architecture.

Tezlink is early by design as it’s a live test environment meant for real experimentation.

If you’ve built on Tezos before, this is your chance to see how that experience evolves in a faster lane. If you haven’t, this might be the cleanest place to start.

🔴 Now Streaming: Latency, Instant Confirmation, and the Next Phase of Tezos

This week on TezTalks Radio, host Brandon Langston speaks with Yann Régis-Gianas, Head of Engineering at Nomadic Labs, about what Tezos X is and more importantly, what it changes for the people actually using Tezos.

Rather than focusing on abstract architecture, this conversation centers on experience. What does latency really mean? What is instant confirmation in practical terms? And when these pieces come together, how different does Tezos feel?

Watch the full episode on YouTube.