Protocol Florence

This page contains all the relevant information for protocol 009 Florence.

The code can be found in the src/proto_009_PsFLoren directory of the master branch of Tezos and its full hash is PsFLorenaUUuikDWvMDr6fGBRG8kt3e3D3fHoXK1j1BFRxeSH4i.

This page documents the changes brought by protocol Florence with respect to Edo.

Smart Contracts/Michelson

Increase max_operation_data_length to 32KB

The maximal size of operations is doubled. In particular this has the effect of slightly more than doubling the maximum size of a smart contract.

Depth-First Execution Order (⚠️ Attention Smart Contract Developers!)

The applied order of inter-contract calls emitted by smart contracts has changed. The operations are now placed in a stack instead of a queue, resulting in a depth-first as opposed to breadth-first execution order, making smart contract development more intuitive.

This change could break contracts that relied on execution order. The development team has backtested the change against all available blocks in Delphi, and found only one contract affected by the change, which has been patched and redeployed. However, smart contract developers should review their contracts for security threats made possible by the new execution order.

Tooling

Normalization RPCs

Two new normalization RPCs, normalize_data and normalize_script, have been added. They can be used to convert Michelson values and scripts that have multiple possible representations into a canonical format. In particular, these RPCs can be used to convert Michelson comb pairs into the format they had before the introduction of the compact notations in Edo.

New failing_noop Operation

A new operation has been added to the protocol that is guaranteed to fail. This feature can be used by tooling (such as tezos-client) to sign arbitrary data securely, without fear of malicious injection into future protocols.

Performance

Endorsements Now Checked in Linear Time (⚠️ Attention Indexers!)

Endorsement and double endorsing evidence operations now contain an additional slot field; the slot should be the smallest among the endorser’s slots.

Indexers, block explorers, and other software making use of operations and receipts should be aware that this a breaking change to the structure of blocks. All other users should be wholly unaffected.

Most notably, the first list of operations is now composed of endorsement_with_slot instead of endorsement operations.

The change will not affect custom signing stacks, as the endorsement_with_slot is just an unsigned wrapper around the Edo-compatible endorsement format.

The reference endorser forges an endorsement, sends it to the signer, and then wraps the result in an endorsement_with_slot before injection.

Staking balance RPC

Some users observed degraded performance in v8.1 as reported in issue tezos#1067. To address this, the measurement of staking balance has been reworked, improving the performance of the /chains/[...]/blocks/[...]/context/delegates/[...] RPC endpoint.

Gas Optimizations

Various optimizations have been added to the gas accounting subsystem. Most notably, gas consumption is now computed using saturated arithmetic.

Governance

Deactivation of the Test Chain in the Economic Protocol

Prior to Florence, Tezos nodes spawned a test chain during the “Testing” phase of voting for the purpose of allowing users to test the new amendment. However, this feature was both unused in practice and quite complex. It has been removed, simplifying the amendment protocol.

Furthermore, the voting periods have been renamed as follows:
  1. Proposal –> Proposal

  2. Testing_vote –> Exploration

  3. Testing –> Cooldown

  4. Promotion_vote –> Promotion

  5. Adoption –> Adoption

Migration

Migrations may now Produce Balance Receipts

Protocol migrations can now update the balance of accounts by producing balance receipts. This was necessary groundwork for Baking Accounts and facilitates developer invoicing.

Internal

Refactoring

Abstract protocol types can now be used consistently outside the protocol.

Authors & Invoice

This protocol amendment has been developed by Nomadic Labs, Metastate, DaiLambda, Marigold, Tarides and the following external contributor: - Keefer Taylor, rewarded ꜩ100 for his contribution on increasing the maximal operation size.