Tezos Rio Upgrade Goes Live—Supercharging Staking and L2 Rewards

Tezos just flipped the switch on its Rio upgrade, and the network’s staking game will never be the same. Validators get more flexibility, layer-2 projects score juicy incentives, and the whole ecosystem dodges another ’ETH killer’ bullet by actually delivering.

Stakers, rejoice: Rio slashes delegation lock-ups and lets you rebalance your baked XTZ without sweating exit queues. Meanwhile, L2 builders get a fat carrot to scale throughput—because apparently ’decentralization’ now means bribing devs to fix your bottlenecks.

Will this finally make Tezos trend alongside the usual VC-backed hype trains? Unlikely. But for once, a blockchain upgrade does what it says on the tin—no vaporware, no ’coming soon’ delays. Take notes, Solana.

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.