Tezos Activates Ushuaia Upgrade With 15-Fold DAL Bandwidth Increase to 10 MB/s

Tezos activated its 21st protocol upgrade, Ushuaia, on June 30 at block 13,857,889, introducing scalability and governance enhancements developed by Nomadic Labs, Trilitech, and Functori. The upgrade required no hard fork, leveraging Tezos' self-amending governance model.

The Ushuaia upgrade increases the Data Availability Layer (DAL) bandwidth by 15 times to 10 MB per second, enabling higher transaction volumes while reducing data bottlenecks. Confirmation times for DAL-stored data improved from approximately 66 seconds to between 12 and 18 seconds. Tezos-based applications including Etherlink, a Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible rollup, are expected to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second under optimal conditions.

Rollup-specific virtual machine upgrades can now be approved through rollup-level governance mechanisms, allowing infrastructure projects to introduce updates independently without waiting for full Layer 1 protocol cycles. As of June 30, XTZ was trading at $0.2088 with a market capitalization of approximately $206 million.