Tezos (XTZ) recently introduced its latest upgrade, called Delphi. The upgrade managed to strongly reduce the project’s smart contract fees, taking them down by as much as 75%. The move was made in order to attract DeFi developers, as fees on Ethereum — the birthplace of DeFi — continue to grow due to the project’s scalability issue.
Details about Delphi
The upgrade is actually proposed quite recently, on September 3rd. It comes as a result of a joint effort from Gabriel Algour, Metastatic, and Nomadic Labs. The proposal intended to help individuals with the development of Tezos-based smart contracts. But, the joint post from the developers also noted that it is crucial for developing novel applications on Tezos.
They stressed that, besides smart contracts, the upgrade would also target a number of other areas, including gaming, collectibles, and, of course, decentralized finance (DeFi).
Gas constraints have limited the complexity and size of smart contracts in the past. This is why people could not easily create contracts with rich functionalities. Their contracts required improvements for a long time.
What improvements does the upgrade bring?
Focusing on the issue, the developers created Delphi, which now includes optimizations to gas computation. The improvement is quite noticeable, as the base cost of manager operations dropped from 10,000 gas units to only 1,000.
As a result, XTZ blocks will now be able to include three and a half times more transactions, and 4 times the amount of multi-asset transfers. As for the contracts, they will also be able to perform 10x the amount of internal calls than before.
Storage cost was also improved, with the price dropping from 1 XTZ to
