JUNØ — AURORA

4 min readApr 5, 2023

The Aurora upgrade v.14 will launch on the Juno main-net shortly! This upgrade comes just weeks after our previously feature packed v.13 core software release.

Aurora will include the following:

x/GlobalFee Module
0 Fee IBC Relaying
x/IBCHooks Module
Stargate Staking Queries
Tokenfactory: ForceTransfer, MintTo, and BurnFrom
x/wasmd 0.31
wasmvm 1.2.1
Command Line quality of life improvements

New: x/GlobalFee

Passed in Juno proposal 68

Currently on cosmos based chains, validators are fully in control of the set network fees. With this new module, a minimum gas fee is set by governance as the gas pricefloor.

At the upgrade, gas fees are set to our setup documentation gas prices default:

0.0025ujuno
0.001uatom (ibc/C4CFF46FD6DE35CA4CF4CE031E643C8FDC9BA4B99AE598E9B0ED98FE3A2319F9)

At any time, governance can increase these fees across the network to help deliver more for developers (through feeshare) and stakers. It can also add new tokens to be accepted as fees such as OSMO and USDC in the future.

If an transaction attack occurs on Juno, validators are able to raise their fees ABOVE the minimum gas fee to protect the network as needed.

After this software upgrade is live, the team will work on drafting a proposal to increase governance fees. This impact will be negligible for network usage, but have a much larger impact for FeeShare based contracts. It is important the community has a say and and give valuable feedback, which is a reason this new module is so powerful for JUNO.

Fee-less IBC Relaying

For our relayers, IBC transfer packets will bypass the the fee minimum to reduce the cost of relaying for Juno network! This includes

MsgRecvPacket
MsgAcknowledgement
MsgUpdateClient
MsgTransfer
MsgTimeout
MsgTimeoutOnClose

Even though these do bypass GlobalFees minimums, they still must pass a Validators’ min_gas_prices config at time of submitting. This is why we have recommended node operators to update their configs to 0 ujuno gas after upgrade.

New: x/IBC-Hooks

This new module from the osmosis team allows for IBC token transfers to execute contracts on other chains with one click. Applications will be able to leverage this by putting the execute messages in the memo field of the users wallet. These can be auto generated, or the user can modify for their specific needs.

This now improves user experience across interchain applications and opens JUNO to cross chain swaps, outpost, and much more!

Cosmwasm 0.31 & CosmwasmVM 1.2.1

Wasmd 0.31 Confio Article

wasmvm 1.2.1 Confio Article

The main feature from this update which many teams have requested is the instantiate2 feature within contracts. This method allows a developer to replicate a contract with predictable addresses. You can find an example of this with this contract example.

Some other notable improvements include:

Governance based weighted votes
new queries from wasmvm 1.2 (add the cosmwasm_1_2 feature in your contract toml)
Uint128/Decimal multiplication
A new ‘Never’ type

New Token Factory Methods

From the previous upgrade, v13, we added the x/TokenFactory module to deliver a better UX for developers and users alike. As the admin of a token denomination you can now Force transfer tokens between accounts, Mint directly to an account, and burn from another account.

In a future update, we will also be adding support to disabling the sending of tokens. This will only allow minting & burning for unique application needs and business logic.

Skip MEV by default

With the passing of Juno proposal 275, Skip’s MEV CometBFT consensus is now used by default. As stated in the proposal, Juno has the highest adoption of Skip in Cosmos. At any time governance can undo this action or change to use a different MEV provider.

This is a quality of life addition for Juno validators. Validators who do not use Skip or have another MEV solution, this will not change their operations in any way. Validators can continue to use other MEV solutions if they so choose.

Command Line Quality of Life

As a developer or validator on Juno, a lot of the commands you run are very redundant. With this upgrade, you can now specify the following configurations for any transaction commands you run:

- Gas
- Gas Prices
- Gas Adjustment
- Fees
- Fee-Account
- Note (memo)

You can set these values just like any other config:
- junod config fees 5000ujuno

Once doing this, your ~/.juno/client.toml file will update with all the latest transaction configuration for these settings with comments.