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Blockchain Release: Block Gossip, State Channels and PoC-v11 Fixes

· 3 min read
Rahul Garg
Abhay Kumar

The core developers have tagged a new 2021.10.07.0 Hotspot firmware release which includes several updates.

This is a mandatory update for manufacturers as it contains updates to PoCv11 code that will be required when we are ready to activate those chain variables and updates to how we will be doing block gossip in the near future.

Improvements to Hotspot bandwidth utilization and Block Gossip​

We have found that as the network expands, bandwidth expectations of individual Hotspots have gone up significantly and want to address this sooner than the Light Hotspot code is available. This release includes preparatory work to enable lower bandwidth gossip. Details are available in the PR listed below but at a high level, this change introduces a new protocol to gossip that dramatically reduces bandwidth utilization.

Critical Bug Fixes in PoCv11 and others​

This release also fixes critical bugs that would prevent activation of PoCv11. Once this blockchain release is on all Hotpots, Validators, ETLs, Routers and Node operators, we believe we can safely activate PoCv11.

Improvements to Witness Decay Rate Implementation​

Although this implementation is not active, we found a few bugs and improvements to the implementation of witness decay rate that could be activated through a HIP and community process to address gaming via over-witnessing. This release updates the implementation to add a threshold and fix some bugs found through review.

Transfer Hotspot v2 Support​

This release also adds support for the new transfer_hotspot_v2 transaction. This transaction removes the requirement of the recipient signature and removes the atomic transfer of HNT with the transfer. The latter feature has been used by a small fraction of total Hotspot transfers. We have also found that the implementation of requiring a recipient signature requires a centralized coordination service which we believe should be removed in the network. This implementation is behind a chain variable that will need to be activated once all blockchain participants have a chance to upgrade to this release.

Snapshot update, Other Bug Fixes and additional OTP-24 support​

This release also addresses other miscellaneous bugs found in the past few weeks and updates the snapshot height to 1042510. It also adds additional support for Erlang/OTP 24 which should allow all blockchain participants to upgrade.

Plan​

We have been beta testing 2021.10.07.0 since Oct 7, 2021 5:15 PM PT. Current ETA for GA is 1:00 PM PT, Oct 08, 2021.