Incoming Testnet Upgrade on Dune Network

As a first step towards a first upgrade of Dune Network, the Testnet network will be upgraded on Thursday, October 17, 2019. All nodes running the testnet branch on Gitlab should be upgraded as soon as possible, and no later than block 94,000, at which the protocol revision will change from 0 to 1. All nodes not upgraded will stop validating blocks.

If all our tests are successful on Testnet, we will announce an upgrade of the Mainnet nodes that should happen at the beginning of November.

Here is a summary of the changes introduced in this revision:

• Better collect-call implementation: contracts can pay fees for users. We will publish a Medium post very soon to show how to use this interesting feature;
• Ironmin storage for contexts: Ironmin improves the speed and size of storing and accessing contexts. It is not activated by default, and it should still be seen as an experimental/testing feature, enabled only when DUNE_CONTEXT_STORAGEenvironment variable is set to ironmin. It is possible to switch back to Irmin (the default storage) using the RPC /storage/context/revert.
• Better P2P communication layer: propagation of node addresses between nodes is improved, to increase the diversity of nodes while decreasing the cost.
• Offline signing of operations: all commands in dune-client to generate operations have a new --forge argument to save the operation. It is then possible to use the sign operationcommand offline, and inject the operation online with inject operation. All these operations must be executed in less than 15 minutes (current max_operation_ttl).
• Debug/verbosity tweaks: with theDUNE_VERBOSE_BAKERenvironment variable, the baker will print the reasons why some operations are discarded (not enough fees in particular).
• Changes of default values: files are now stored in ~/.dune-COMMAND for Mainnet, and ~/.dune-testnet-COMMANDfor Testnet, by default. Default ports on Mainnet are p2p_port=9733, rpc_port=8733, discovery_port=10733, signer_tcp_port=7733 and signer_http_port=6733 by default. The ports are increased by 1 on Testnet (i.e. X734 instead of X733).
• Lots of small improvements in dune-client for better user interaction.