v1.1.8-rc.1: Pirate Unified Wallet v1.1.8 (Release Candidate 1)

v1.1.8-rc.1 is the release candidate for Pirate Unified Wallet v1.1.8. It introduces faster and more resilient synchronization, improved privacy-network handling, broader Linux compatibility, and safer, deterministic release packaging.

## Faster and More Resilient Sync

- Added automatic multi-server synchronization for eligible mainnet configurations. Auto mode validates compatible lightwalletd servers and can download ordered historical block ranges from multiple sources.
- Added validated failover while preserving explicit manual servers, custom endpoints, certificate pins, testnet settings, and private-network routing.
- Historical rescans now bootstrap at the requested height instead of unnecessarily replaying from Sapling activation when suitable tree state is available.
- Added capability-aware routing for Sapling and Ironwood subtree roots, allowing Auto mode to use a validated compatible server without changing the normal sync endpoint.
- Improved cached-rescan throughput, durable prefetch admission, dense-block workload control, and sync progress reporting.
- Preserved the last durable wallet height during startup recovery and automatically restart synchronization when it stops unexpectedly.
- Added broader recovery and regression coverage for stale endpoints, interrupted sync, historical rescans, endpoint failover, and chain-tail updates.

## Privacy and Networking

- Made the latest Direct, Tor, SOCKS, or I2P selection authoritative and cancel stale connection requests when the transport changes.
- Prevented old health checks and private-network requests from blocking the settings screen or reporting results for a transport that is no longer selected.
- Kept Tor configurations on onion endpoints and moved embedded Tor state into app-private storage on Android.
- Improved embedded I2P startup, SOCKS connectivity, endpoint validation, retry behavior, and slow-network timeout handling.
- Removed the incompatible mainnet I2P endpoint and improved recovery when a private endpoint remains offline.
- Bounded connection tests so failed or unreachable private transports no longer wait indefinitely.

## Endpoint and Wallet Experience

- Added a persistent Auto server option with curated Pirate, Qortal, CryptoForge, and supported MathNodes endpoints.
- Applied endpoint selections immediately and restored the previous configuration if saving fails.
- Added an Auto-mode tooltip explaining parallel synchronization in straightforward language.
- Improved endpoint health presentation and added diagnostic logging for automatic pools, alternate servers, routing decisions, and rescans.
- Updated and localized endpoint names, Auto-mode descriptions, health states, and private-network guidance across all supported languages.
- Improved seed import error handling so valid recovery phrases are not incorrectly reported as invalid when a later setup or secure-storage operation fails.
- Enabled the required macOS Keychain entitlements and made non-secret seed-language preference persistence resilient to unavailable secure storage.

## Linux Compatibility

- Established Ubuntu 22.04 and GLIBC 2.35 as the compatibility floor for published Linux artifacts.
- Built embedded i2pd from pinned source on the supported ABI baseline instead of packaging a binary requiring a newer Linux distribution.
- Added fail-closed ELF symbol checks for Flutter bundles, AppImages, command-line tools, Qortal JNI, native FFI, and x86_64 and aarch64 releases.
- Fixed the Flatpak Flutter runtime layout that could cause the application to exit without opening.

## Security and Deterministic Builds

- Updated audited Rust dependencies, including the patched `h2` release for RUSTSEC-2026-0258.
- Tightened Cargo audit and cargo-deny policy while retaining only the documented transitive RSA exception with no available fixed release.
- Made Komodo coin, icon, and KDF assets checksum-pinned and hermetic for Flutter builds.
- Added one validated Flutter asset preflight for every supported desktop and mobile build.
- Standardized unit and widget tests so upstream asset transformers cannot perform unexpected network downloads.
- Made tag-derived application versions authoritative and added release gates that reject artifact version drift.

## SDK and Package Delivery

- Reduced React Native iOS archive size by removing debug and incremental data, enabling optimized release linking, and stripping nonessential symbols.
- Split the oversized combined iOS simulator package into separate arm64 and x86_64 companion packages.
- Added strict package allowlists that reject unexpected files, debug bundles, symlinks, incorrect architectures, and oversized payloads.
- Updated the React Native package family to version 0.3.2.
- Refreshed CLI, Qortal, native FFI, iOS SDK, and Android SDK artifacts to version 0.3.1.
- Made Native FFI packaging deterministic by validating the reviewed C ABI, building from Cargo.lock, and removing runner-dependent header generation.
- Added an explicit, pinned cbindgen workflow for intentional Native FFI header regeneration.

[Read the v1.1.7 release notes](https://github.com/PirateNetwork/Pirate-Unified-Light-Wallet/releases/tag/v1.1.7)

[View the full changes since v1.1.7](https://github.com/PirateNetwork/Pirate-Unified-Light-Wallet/compare/v1.1.7...v1.1.8-rc.1)