Mainnet Upgrade to Protocol Revision 1 scheduled for November 5, 2019 at block 83,400

Five weeks after the first public release of Dune Network, we are thrilled to announce that the first protocol revision of our Mainnet will happen around November 5, 2019, at level 83,400. All nodes must have been upgraded to a commit downloaded from the mainnet branch of Gitlab no earlier than Oct 23, 2019. The git tag protocol-4.1 has been created to mark the revision commit, i.e. revision 1 of protocol 4.

Nodes that will not have been updated will automatically stop validating blocks afterwards. In such a case, after upgrading their nodes, admins should use dune-admin-client unmark all invalid blocks to restart validating blocks.

This revision has already been tested on the Testnet for one week. The next revision will target the integration of some useful features from the Babylon amendment, and the first release of the Love VM.

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

• 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.