Blockchain Release: Network Improvements

The core developers have tagged a new 2021.06.18.0 Hotspot firmware release which contains network improvements related to NAT and bug fixes related to staking for Validators. This is a required release for Hotspot owners. As some of the community members have noticed that the blockchain has not generated a new snapshot since the last GA, we believe that the improvements to networking and an increment to snapshot memory generation limit will fix snapshot generation. The core developers plan to do another minor release with a snapshot update once it gets generated by the blockchain.

Below are the related PRs:

• Network improvements

  The core developers have squashed a few NAT related bugs in erlang-libp2p, we believe these fixes should significantly improve Hotspot sync.

  • erlang-libp2p#356: Stand a relay if stungun repeatedly fails to verifiably resolve
  • erlang-libp2p#355: Handle relay server crashing and re-acquire a relay address
  • erlang-libp2p#354: Cancel retry timer on relay stop command
  • erlang-libp2p#353: Once NAT type is detected, stop trying to re-detect it
  • erlang-libp2p#351: Make 3 distinct observed addresses trigger static NAT determination
  • erlang-libp2p#350: Improve static port map discovery for other NAT types

• Blockchain Bug fixes

  A few blockchain-core bug fixes are also packed in this release specifically around snapshot generation and staking bugs observed on the Testnet.

  • blockchain-core#870: Increase snapshot generation memory limit
  • blockchain-core#868: Move tenure penalties to the beginning of the election round
  • blockchain-core#865: Fix off-by-one validation error in blockchain_txn_unstake_validator_v1

Plan

We have been beta testing 2021.06.18.0 since June 18th, 2021 10:30 AM PT. Current ETA for GA is 2:00 PM PT, June 18th, 2021.