Announcing Oxford 2: a revised 15th protocol upgrade proposal

Research and Development
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This is a joint post from Nomadic Labs, Marigold, TriliTech, Oxhead Alpha, Tarides, DaiLambda & Functori.

After the Oxford protocol upgrade proposal did not gather the required supermajority of affirmative votes in its promotion period vote, we presented an action plan centered around improving staking UX for bakers and furthering the continuous development of Smart Rollups and other features of the Tezos protocol, e.g. Timelocks.

We thank bakers, infrastructure and application developers, and the Tezos ecosystem at large for their feedback, in particular towards the proposed changes in slashing and automated staked funds management for bakers.

Today, we are pleased to announce that this revised Oxford 2 protocol proposal is ready to be submitted to the Tezos governance mechanism. The proposal’s hash is ProxfordYmVfjWnRcgjWH36fW6PArwqykTFzotUxRs6gmTcZDuH.

In a nutshell, the proposed changes in Oxford 2 can be summarized as follows:

  • Adaptive Issuance and the new Staking mechanism are disabled: Oxford 2 would not allow the activation of Adaptive Issuance nor extend the Staking mechanism to delegators in its lifetime. The feature vote mechanism inherited from Oxford remains available, but the result of the vote is ignored by the Oxford 2 protocol.
  • Refinements of Tezos PoS: the Oxford 2 proposal introduces changes to slashing and an automated auto-staking mechanism for bakers. The latter aims to smooth the transition towards the new staked funds management API and avoids manual bookkeeping to counter over-delegation.
  • Timelocks are re-enabled: a new design and implementation of Timelocks addresses security concerns that led to their temporary deactivation in a previous protocol upgrade.
  • Smart Rollups keep evolving: Oxford 2 introduces private Smart Rollups, allowing developers to choose between permissionned or permissionless deployments. Oxford 2 also simplifies the deployment of rollups both on protocol and periodic test networks, as well as on ad-hoc dedicated ones.

See this blog post for further details on Oxford 2 proposal

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