On 25 October 2026, Tezos (XTZ) traded at about $0.286, according to CoinGecko. That was down 3.9% on the day, with a market capitalisation of roughly $315 million, ranked 137th. XTZ is about 97% below its all-time high of $9.12, set on 4 October 2021. Over the past three weeks it has held a narrow range: daily closes ran from about $0.289 to $0.333 between 6 and 24 October. Recent development work has been steady, including a protocol upgrade on 30 June, an Etherlink upgrade on 21 August and a post-quantum testnet in late September. None of it has lifted the price so far.
XTZ price snapshot (25 October 2026)
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Price | ~$0.286 |
| 24-hour change | -3.9% |
| Market capitalisation | ~$314.9 million |
| Market-cap rank | 137 |
| 24-hour trading volume | ~$3.65 million |
| Circulating supply | ~1.1 billion XTZ |
| Maximum supply | None (inflationary, see staking below) |
| All-time high | $9.12 (4 October 2021) |
| All-time low (CoinGecko) | $0.1918 |
All figures are from CoinGecko on 25 October 2026. Other data providers list the all-time high between $9.08 and $9.18, all on 4 October 2021. The difference comes from how each one aggregates intraday highs.
To get back to $9.12 from $0.286, XTZ would have to rise about 32 times.
Recent closes
| Date (UTC) | Close (USD) |
|---|---|
| 24 Oct 2026 | 0.2965 |
| 21 Oct 2026 | 0.3157 |
| 17 Oct 2026 | 0.3007 |
| 13 Oct 2026 | 0.3228 |
| 8 Oct 2026 | 0.2891 |
| 6 Oct 2026 | 0.3331 |
Source: CoinGecko historical data.
Staking or delegating: how much more tez per year?
Enter the XTZ you hold and the two yields to see how many extra tez a year staking would earn over delegating.
| XTZ you would stake or delegate | Staking yield | Delegation yield | Extra tez per year from staking instead of delegating |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 XTZ | 8.4 % | 2.8 % | 5.6 XTZ |
| 100 XTZ | 8.4 % | 2.8 % | 5.6 XTZ |
| 50 XTZ | 8.4 % | 2.8 % | 2.8 XTZ |
- The yields start at the 7 July 2026 figures (8.4% staking, 2.8% delegating) and can be changed. Both move with the staked ratio.
- The result is in tez, not dollars. It treats the yield as a simple annual rate and ignores compounding and baker commission.
This is arithmetic on your inputs only. It leaves out the XTZ price, baker commission, slashing risk and the up-to-4-day unstaking delay, and it cannot tell you what future yields will be.
What changed on Tezos in 2026
Etherlink 7.0 "Ganesha" (21 August 2026)
Etherlink is the EVM-compatible layer secured by Tezos. Its 7.0 upgrade activated on 21 August 2026, and the promotion vote reached a 40.11% quorum, which the Tezos ecosystem called a record for Etherlink governance. Ganesha did two things:
- It added a Michelson interface alongside the existing EVM environment.
- It introduced native atomic composability, so contracts in the two environments can call each other within a single transaction.
The upgrade came after an earlier version of the proposal was withdrawn. Testing found a security vulnerability in that kernel, bakers were asked not to support it, and a corrected version was resubmitted on 19 August. The flawed version never reached mainnet.
Etherlink 7.2 followed in September. It fixed potential denial-of-service and liveness issues. The developers who disclosed the issues fixed in 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2 said none had been exploited.
Tezos X: partly live, mainnet still pending
Tezos X is the plan to run EVM (Solidity) and Michelson applications on one chain, with shared assets and cross-calls, all secured by Tezos Layer 1. The official Tezos X page lists:
- Testnet: live since May 2026.
- Mainnet activation: "Planned", to be delivered as an upgrade to Etherlink. The page lists it for Q3 2026, which has now ended without activation.
- JavaScript and Python support: "In development" for H2 2026. It depends on moving from WASM to RISC-V with JIT compilation.
The August 2026 ecosystem recap says the full Tezos X experience has not yet arrived. End-user tooling and a unified network experience are still to come. Earlier expectations of a launch in H1 2026 with JavaScript and Python support did not come true.
Layer 1 protocol upgrades
| Upgrade | Activated | Main changes |
|---|---|---|
| Rio (18th) | May 2025 | 1-day cycles; 10% of participation rewards go to the Data Availability Layer |
| Seoul (19th) | September 2025 | Protocol-native multisig accounts, aggregated attestations, one-click unstaking |
| Tallinn (20th) | January 2026 | 6-second blocks; up to 100x storage efficiency for Michelson apps |
| Ushuaia (21st) | 30 June 2026 | Data Availability Layer bandwidth raised to 10 MB/s; Layer 1 confirmations cut from ~66 s to 12–18 s |
Tezos changes its protocol through on-chain votes instead of hard forks. Each amendment passes through five periods of 14 cycles each, about 14 days per period: Proposal, Exploration, Cooldown, Promotion and Adoption. Bakers vote with voting power equal to their staking balance. A proposal needs to meet a quorum, and Yea votes must exceed 80% of Yea plus Nay votes.
Post-quantum testnet (September 2026)
In late September 2026 the Tezos ecosystem launched Quantumnet, an experimental post-quantum testnet. It uses ML-DSA-44 signatures (tz5 accounts), and XMSS signatures with STARK aggregation for consensus. The project itself describes it as "still very early work".
Institutional and market-structure news
- 4 February 2026: A CFTC-regulated US derivatives venue (a designated contract market) listed the first US XTZ futures contract. Its president said six months of trading history "checks a key box" under the SEC's generic listing standards for spot ETFs. That is the venue's own view; there is no XTZ spot ETF.
- 20 January 2026: TenX Protocols reported buying about 5.54 million XTZ between 2 and 19 January at an average of about $0.5868 per token, as part of a staking partnership with the Tezos Foundation. The Foundation said it intends to delegate part of its holdings to TenX validators, subject to due diligence.
- 16 September 2026: A federally chartered US crypto bank announced custody support for Etherlink assets, including WXTZ, stXTZ and the tokenised uranium token xU3O8.
What moves the Tezos price
Market-wide direction
XTZ is a small-cap altcoin, so it tends to move with the wider crypto market.
Adoption that has yet to show up in price
The June, August and September upgrades are real deliveries. Yet XTZ closed at $0.333 on 6 October and was below $0.30 by 24 October. TenX paid an average of about $0.587 in January. So far the market has not priced the 2026 upgrades as a demand driver. Signals worth watching:
- Tezos X mainnet activation and its governance vote
- Activity on Etherlink after Ganesha
- Tokenised real-world assets on Tezos, such as xU3O8
- Whether US XTZ futures volume grows enough to support an ETF application
Supply and staking
XTZ has no maximum supply. Under Adaptive Issuance, the protocol raises rewards when the share of staked tez is below a target of about 50% and lowers them when it is above. As of 7 July 2026, the Tezos ecosystem reported:
- About 29% of supply staked, up from about 7% when the model launched
- Issuance below 3% for the first time
- More tez staked than delegated, for the first time
Lower issuance means less new supply diluting holders. It does not in itself create buying demand.
Staking vs. delegating XTZ: current numbers
Staking now pays three times what delegation does. On 7 July 2026, the Tezos ecosystem published these yields:
| Staking | Delegating | |
|---|---|---|
| Yield (7 July 2026) | 8.4% APY | 2.8% APY |
| Can you spend the tez? | No, staked tez stay in your account but are frozen | Yes, at any time |
| Exit | Unstake at any time; funds unlock after up to ~4 days (3 cycles plus the rest of the current one) | Immediate |
| Slashing risk | Yes, in proportion to your share if your baker is slashed | None |
Both yields move with the staked ratio, so the live rate can differ from these July figures.
How to stake or delegate
- Hold XTZ in a self-custody Tezos wallet, and keep about 1 tez unstaked for fees.
- Choose a baker. The things that matter are its commission, its free staking capacity, how reliably it bakes when given the chance, and any past slashing.
- Delegate to that baker. To earn the higher rate, also stake. An account can have only one delegate at a time.
- If you switch bakers while staked, your whole stake with the old baker is automatically unstaked.
