With the Seoul upgrade live on mainnet, the Tezos protocol now supports aggregated attestations where BLS cryptography (tz4) compresses hundreds of attestations into one.
Beyond reducing bandwidth and storage — paving the way for faster block times — aggregated attestations also make it possible to extend the consensus committee to all bakers (instead of a randomly sampled subset), improving both security and efficiency.
To give bakers time to adapt, this change will only activate once 50% of bakers sign with tz4 (BLS) addresses. We plan to include this in the upcoming T protocol proposal.
Why this matters
Extending the attestation committee to all active bakers strengthens the network and improves the user experience:
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Stronger security: More bakers attesting means stronger consensus and higher resilience.
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More predictable rewards: Attestation rewards scale directly with baking power, removing randomness.
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Lighter consensus: Dropping attestation slot computation streamlines consensus and supports shorter block times.
A threshold puts bakers in the driver’s seat
The feature activates only if more than 50% of bakers use tz4 addresses:
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50% is enough. At this level, all bakers – including those using tz1-tz3 – can be included without performance loss.
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Gradual rollout. Bakers can migrate at their own pace.
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Room for maturity. Signing tools gain time to stabilize.
Several signing solutions are already available including Tezos RPi BLS Signer, TezSign, and Signatory.
Once the 50% threshold is reached, the feature remains active even if participation later dips below it.
Overall, this is a significant step toward even shorter block times, faster finality, and more predictable staking rewards, while maintaining decentralization and accessibility.
If you’d like more details or have questions, feel free to ask in the comments — we’ll be monitoring closely.
And stay tuned! In an upcoming post, we’ll share more about the Tezos RPi BLS Signer, a performant and accessible hardware option for small and mid-size bakers.
