Tezos activates Rio upgrade, enhancing staking flexibility and L2 incentives

Tezos has successfully activated Rio, its 18th protocol upgrade, marking another milestone in the blockchain’s Tezos X roadmap

The upgrade was approved through the network’s on-chain governance process, with participation from validators and community members, and aims to enhance staking flexibility, support growth on Layer 2, and strengthen the network’s validator framework.

A key feature of the Rio upgrade is a reduction in the Tezos’ (XTZ) cycle length—from approximately three days to just one, according to a note shared with crypto.news

This change significantly shortens the time users must wait when moving funds between staking and other network activities, such as interacting with decentralized applications.

The shorter cycle is expected to improve user experience across Web3 services by making staking more accessible and responsive. Future upgrades may further reduce unstaking wait times, according to protocol developers.

###DAL and scalability

Rio also advances the adoption of the Tezos Data Availability Layer (DAL), first introduced on mainnet with the Paris upgrade in 2024

The DAL is designed to improve scalability by increasing the volume of transaction data that can be published on-chain by up to 4,000 times, while reducing the costs for rollup-based applications like Etherlink

With Rio, the protocol now allocates 10% of baking rewards to bakers participating in DAL, creating a direct incentive to support L2 scaling.

To improve network reliability, Rio introduces stricter inactivity thresholds for bakers. Under the new rules, bakers who remain unresponsive for more than two days are marked inactive and temporarily lose their consensus rights

This measure is designed to reduce the risk of slowdowns and increase the network’s overall resilience.

The upgrade was developed collaboratively by Nomadic Labs, Trilitech, and Functori, and is part of Tezos’ ongoing approach to self-amending upgrades and community-led governance