Dash Core v0.16.0.1 was released on Wednesday, September 30th, the first release of v0.16.x.
Please see the Updated Product Brief to learn about the main improvements in v0.16 or the Release Notes for the detailed set of changes.
Wednesday October 7th marks one week since the release of v0.16.0.1, and I would like to share some statistics and information about the migration.
Note: v16 is a mandatory upgrade for everyone: miners, masternodes and users; oh my! Once the hard fork activates and the diverging block is mined, outdated clients will no longer follow the main chain.
Masternode Upgrade Progress
In just one week, over a half of all masternodes have been upgraded to v0.16.0.1. This is wonderful progress, and we would like to thank all the MNOs for taking the time to upgrade promptly.
Miner Upgrade Progress
Version 0.16 includes a BIP9 activated hard fork. The activation works in periods or “windows” of 4032 blocks. The first window opened at block 1350720, and was mined on Oct 7, 2020 at 1:24:18 PM UTC. This window is roughly ~7.35 days long and would require 80% of the miners to upgrade for the hard fork to “Lock in”. Each subsequent window reduces the threshold slightly, until it reaches 60% in 10 windows. The exact threshold schedule can be found here. At the time of writing, several of the small pools have already mined blocks signalling support of the upgrade. We encourage all miners to test this new release and begin upgrading your systems to v0.16.0.1.
Spork Activation and old Masternode PoSe banning
In this release, two new sporks have been added, Spork 21 and Spork 22.
Spork 21 enables minimum protocol checks and LLMQ concentrated recovery. Spork 21 will be activated approximately seven days after 80% of the masternodes have upgraded, to ensure that all MN operators have sufficient time to upgrade their node(s). Once Spork 21 is activated, non-upgraded nodes will begin to be Proof of Service (PoSe) banned. A more exact date will be announced once this threshold has been met.
The timeline for Spork 22, which bumps the maximum number of participants in a round of PrivateSend to 20, will be specified in a future post.