Tezos have adopted Delphi and they have successfully upgraded.  Delphi significantly lowers storage costs for the smart contracts.  Details about the technical improvements in Delphi have been published by the Tezos Foundation.

Before the Delphi, smart contracts were limited to a great extent by the gas constraints.  Therefore, developers who are building contracts by using the rich functionality have been looking at some improvements, which deal with the constraints for some time.

In this regard, Sydney Ifergan, the crypto expert tweeted:  “Tezos (XTZ) have done something that any user will like, which is to reduce the gas constraints with their interim improvement proposal. Kudos.”

How Gas Constraints were Reduced

About a couple of months ago, it was discussed as to whether an interim protocol proposal, which can help introduce gas improvements.  And it was also reinstated that these gas improvements should be made sooner.  They believed that if this occurs, it is going to motivate building more of smart contracts on Tezos.

Protocol proposals were made.  These interim proposals lead to the current improvements, which are important to provide for novel applications on Tezos particularly in areas like DeFi “Decentralized Finance”, collectibles, and gaming.

Tezos (XTZ) Improved the Michelson

Some work has been done in improving the performance of Michelson type checker and interpreter, and on refining the cost model.  This has eventually mitigated the gas problem.

When they decided to make the protocol change, they were sure that they were looking at a small protocol change.  Tezos feels that it is better to make small changes, which are simple to create and evaluate than to look at larger ones. 

The interim protocol proposal was made in a way to be focused on improving gas constraints. All these tasks did not affect the proposal date for Dalphanet.

Since, the change that was proposed was small it was able to get it done easily and the finished proposal is named as Delphi. The subset of changes that have been made to the “Tezos protocol in Dalphanet” have considerably improved the performance and it has relaxed the gas constraints.

Tezos (XTZ) Performance gains

• Includes 3.5 times more simple TZ to TZ ops
• A block may now include 4 times more FA2 transfers
• A contract may perform 10 times more internal calls

The precise improvement will vary from one smart contract to another.  However, in large and complex contracts where there is a need to make multiple calls to other contracts with substantial computation, the benefits will be visible.