Blocknet Comet 4.1 has been released
This is a MANDATORY update for everyone, regardless if you’re a holder, staker, service provider, or Service Node operator. You must update before block 1382400 (estimated March 20th 5am UTC +0).
Blocknet Comet is the largest release to date and is a direct fork of Bitcoin Core v0.18 with integrated Blocknet Proof-of-Stake (PoS), on-chain governance, and Blocknet Service Nodes (masternodes). Blocknet has adopted all of the latest security updates and protocol enhancements in the bitcoin core codebase providing Service Node operators and enterprises with the latest security enhancements adopted by bitcoin core.
Comet 4.1 contains many upgrades and bug fixes of the previous Comet release. The fulls details are as follows:
Staking Protocol
This release includes a staking protocol upgrade that consists of improved handling of staking orphans, improved block spacing via a difficulty adjustment which will bring us back to our target block time, and a fix for a bug where inputs would stop staking.
BIP9 Sporks
Also as a reminder that after March 15th, once 95% of stakers signal support for a BIP9 spork, the Blocknet network will activate network fees paid to stakers instead of being burned, SegWit support, and staking to p2pkh instead of p2pk.
Wallet
The wallet now includes the lock/unlock menu options (re-added), the ability to maximize the startup syncing screen by clicking the syncing bar, a fix for MacOS staking crashes, and a new -lowmemoryload=1 parameter for use with low-memory clients like the Raspberry Pi.
Service Nodes
A new Service Nodes tab has been added to monitor your own Service Node as well as others — you don’t need a Service Node to view this page. You can also view your Service Node’s status with the servicenodestatus call from the collateral wallet. For Service Node setup, the servicenodecreateinputs call has been updated to also create voting inputs and return change to the specified Service Node address. There’s also a fix for a bug that wouldn’t allow you to specify the port= and host= setting at the same time.
Governance
This release includes improved vote tallying to ensure accurate totals of the on-chain votes, displaying vote count totals in the Proposals screen, a listproposals rpc update to include the status of each proposal (passing, failing, etc), and a bug fix where voting only pulls vote inputs from addresses with at least 5k BLOCK. In addition, there’s an upgrade to the voting call for the ability to vote only from a specific address (only via CLI). When you do this the maximum amount of votes for that address will be cast as opposed to previously where you cast the maximum amount of votes for that wallet.
A new voting screen has been created that allows voting across multiple proposals simultaneously, which reduces voting fees and the number of required voting transactions. Previously one voting transaction was submitted to the network per proposal when voting, now one transaction is submitted for multiple proposals.
XRouter
For XRouter, there is a new xrUpdateNetworkServices call that queries random service nodes for the latest Service Node list. This allows on-demand access to the snode list without having to wait for online Service Nodes to send out their service pings. The Service Node being queried must be in the getpeerinfo list and will provide its known Service Node list. xrGetBlock and xrGetBlocks have also been improved for ETH calls. Transaction output is no longer included in the json response for these calls. You can also specify either the hex or block number to obtain the details for that block. Instead, xrGetTransaction and xrGetTransactions can be used to obtain transaction information.
XBridge
This release contains an XBridge protocol upgrade required for the various changes. Most importantly is an improved locktime drift. This pertains to many reports about failed trades due to a difference in each party’s block height, specifically BTC. With this change, for chains with block times less than 10 minutes the locktime drift is increased to 15 minutes (from 10min) and for chains with block times of 10 minutes or more (BTC) the locktime drift is set to a 4 block maximum (previously 2). For chains with block times of 10 minutes or more the taker’s lock time has also been increased to 1 hour to accommodate these changes (previously 30 minutes). All other chains will remain at 30 minute taker lock times. Aside from that, there were bug fixes to prevent charging a trade fee if you take an order with insufficient funds and to relist orders that are cancelled at accepting (status 1/5).
This is a MANDATORY update for everyone, regardless if you’re a holder, staker, service provider, or Service Node operator. You must update before block 1382400 (estimated March 20th 5am UTC +0).
Looking Forward
Blocknet has many exciting milestones approaching as we move through the year including XRouter C++ and Golang lite libraries to interact with XRouter without requiring the installation of the Blocknet wallet, the Enterprise XRouter Proxy which will allow Service Nodes to handle millions of requests per second, XBridge Segwit address and staking input compatibility, partial orders for Block DX, an XRouter-powered lite multiwallet developed by CloudChains Inc that’s compatible with Block DX, and much much more.
To learn more about Blocknet, check out our website, API, documentation, Discord, and whitepaper. You can also check out the full 2020 roadmap here.
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