A brief recap of Nomadic Labs’ plans for consensus:
- We’re currently running Emmy+.
- We plan to propose to move to Emmy* soon.
- Then we plan to propose to move to Tenderbake.
We recall Tenderbake’s main advantages over Emmy+ and Emmy*:
- Tenderbake has deterministic finality : a block that has just been appended to the chain of some node is final once it has two additional blocks on top of it.
- Tenderbake has safety under asynchrony : no fork (of length more than two) is possible, even if the network is partitioned.
The current block time is 60 seconds, with typical expected time to finality of approximately six minutes, assuming the network is working properly.
We expect to reduce block time to 30 seconds when we launch Emmy* and we plan to stay with a block time of at most 30 seconds with Tenderbake. This means that once Tezos is fully upgraded to the Tenderbake consensus algorithm, users can expect to see a time to finality of at most one minute, assuming the network is working properly – down from the current six minutes, and with no danger of forks.
Plenty more details are in this blog post.
Tezos is constantly evolving, thanks to its facility to self-amend without hard forks by community vote. We will continue exploring new consensus algorithms and improving the implementation, and we intend to further reduce block times in the future. You can expect to see these improvements become the topics of future Tezos Improvement Proposals. So watch this space!
