The fully decentralized Aleo mainnet has been live for over two months, and the response has been incredible. 5 million transactions, tens of thousands of users, and thousands of zero-knowledge proof miners are active on Aleo.
While all of this activity was going on, development of the underlying software has continued at full — but responsible — speed. We’re excited to reveal our new deployment schedule, and to announce the first release candidate: v3.1.0. This article will give you a TL;DR of the most impactful changes.
Aleo’s release schedule
In a previous blog post, we highlighted the different public networks through which every software change needs to run: Canary, Testnet and Mainnet. While new releases are tested on Canary on a frequent basis, they need to be running on Canary for at least a week before moving to Testnet. After running successfully for two weeks on Testnet, Mainnet validators are invited to update their validators to this latest stable release.
As a result, the community gets access to exciting new usability and performance upgrades on a steady basis. View the latest version of the active release schedule for more on what's coming next.
Release notes for v3.1.0
snarkVM Consensus Changes
The most consequential change in this release is that a consensus update is going to take place, introducing two features requested by many members of the Aleo community:
ARC42 - AleoNet/snarkVM#2569 Use timestamp-based block_reward and coinbase_reward algorithms (instead of height-based) for more accurate rewards emission.
AleoNet/snarkVM#2564 Reduced mapping base cost from 10,000 to 1,500 microcredits for GET operations based on benchmarked runtime performance, optimizing chain economics while maintaining safety margins.
The consensus changes will occur at the following blocks:
Canary - Block 2,900,000
Testnet - Block 2,950,000
Mainnet - Block 2,800,000
Note: The following endpoints were deprecated and changed to:
/<network>/latest/height ===> /<network>/block/height/latest
/<network>/latest/hash ===> /<network>/block/hash/latest
/<network>/latest/block ===> /<network>/block/latest
/<network>/latest/stateRoot ===> /<network>/stateRoot/latest
/<network>/latest/committee ===> /<network>/committee/latest
ATTENTION: Validators that do not upgrade in time will be at risk of forking and require manual intervention. Clients that do not upgrade will be at risk of halting until an upgrade occurs.
Other important changes
- The CDN has been created and updated for all of the Aleo networks.
- The
--seed flagwas removed from thesnarkos account signcommand, because it exposes users to unsafe behavior. - Deprecated REST endpoints were removed.
- A new REST endpoint to GET mapping values was added.
- Fixes the --rest-rps flag to parse the given rate limit as you would expect it to.
- Adding private key file support for secure program execution.
- Fixed JSON serialization of u128 elements.
- Limit parallel processing of transmissions in clients to prevent OOM crashes.
- Periodically process transmissions in the mempool.
- Mitigate network spam by banning misbehaving IPs.
Full Changeset
Many more documentation, performance and stability improvements were made.
For a full overview of the merged changes, we invite you to dive into the following intermediary canary releases:
Conclusion
We are immensely grateful to the Aleo community for their support and enthusiastic participation in testing these updates across our networks. These improvements reflect our commitment to building a more efficient and user-friendly ecosystem based on your valuable feedback. We look forward to seeing what you'll build next and as always, we encourage you to share your experiences and suggestions as we continue to evolve the Aleo platform together.