Taiko Mainnet Set for BCR Protocol Upgrade to Version 1.7.0

Taiko has announced an upcoming upgrade of its BCR mainnet protocol to version 1.7.0, scheduled for July 1st. According to taiko.mirror.xyz, this release maintains ABI compatibility with the current Taiko-geth and client releases but introduces underlying protocol changes that will impact block proposers and provers.

Hekla Protocol Already Upgraded

The Hekla protocol has already been upgraded, which may lead to failures in some block proposals and proving transactions. Block proposers and provers are encouraged to update their transaction parameters promptly to avoid disruptions.

Breaking Changes for Proposers and Provers

The new protocol mandates that the block's assigned prover must also be the proposer. As a result, certain block proposal parameters will be deprecated and ignored. This change aims to optimize gas usage by eliminating hook calls, which are considered expensive.

Block proposers must now also prove their own blocks, or risk forfeiting their liveness bond. Those working with a prover partner or using two EOAs for proposing and proving blocks will need to deploy a contract to call proposeBlock and proveBlock functions in the TaikoL1 contract. Detailed information can be found in the ProverSet contract code.

Additionally, block provers must verify whether the stateRoot of an existing transition is zero. If it is, the protocol will only compare the blockHash to determine if another transition is a contestation. Currently, all existing transitions have non-zero stateRoot values, and the protocol compares both the stateRoot and the blockHash to ascertain if two transitions are identical.

Other Changes

The upgrade will also reduce the liveness bond and SGX proofs’ validity and contestation bond by 50%, allowing more participants in Taiko’s permissionless transaction sequencing with lower capital costs. Additionally, several minor changes to data persistence on Ethereum will reduce gas costs, expected to decrease the gas footprint on L1 post-upgrade. These changes will be reflected in the Dune Dashboard.

For a complete list of changes, refer to the 1.7.0 release note.

Request for Feedback

Taiko invites feedback from proposers, provers, Ethereum researchers, and all users to help improve the protocol. Feedback is especially valuable before the establishment of a DAO.

Contribute to Taiko

Contributors can participate in Taiko’s development on GitHub and earn a GitPOAP, with recognition as a contributor on the README. Interested individuals can get started with the contributing manual.