Everest C-chain Update

Fix a performance bug in the C-chain that caused unconscionably long bootstrapping times.

Everest Update

This update freezes the APIs for the first version of mainnet and includes numerous updates.

• avm.send now has an optional froms field to specify which address(es) to send funds from.
• nodes now track the uptime of their peers.
• auth token support was added to the http api.
• the ipc socket was changed to use raw byte streams rather than following the nanomsg protocol, due to observed message unreliability and low speeds.
• the mainnet minting function was implemented.
• gecko was renamed to avalanchego.
• fixed file descriptor leak in the plugin interface.

Everest Upgrade

This release includes various bug fixes, optimizations, and improvements.

• Fixed Snowstorm UTXO memory leak in the conflict graph implementation when rejecting non-transitively conflicting transactions.
• Fixed Snowstorm duplicated accept call in the input graph implementation when voting on optimistically accepted transactions.
• Renamed "Default Subnet" to "Primary Network."
• Added Memo field to the AVM Send API.
• Fixed IPC nil pointer caused by incorrect initialization order.
• Fixed validator list serialization. Previously the validator list was serialized into a single Key/Value pair in the DB, which caused errors when the validator set grew too large. Now the list is properly chunked.
• Updated network version checking to allow for higher version peers to decide if the versions are compatible.

Everest Patch

This release:

• Fixes a bug in the adaptive network timeouts. Previously network timeouts were uncapped. Additionally the timeout multiplier was set to 2. This resulted in timeouts growing much larger than expected. We've introduced a cap to the timeout value and reduced the multiplier to 1.1 to prevent excessively large timeouts.
• Updates how plugin processes are executed to support running plugins on windows.
• Includes other small performance / code hygiene updates.

Everest Release Patch

This release patches a bug in the P-chain calculate validators call that caused the go runtime to deadlock with go v1.13.

Everest release

This is the first release of an Everest compatible node. This update is a major update from the previous Denali compatible release.

Networking updates:

• Introduced adaptive timeouts to learn what the current network delay is. This enables liveness during larger than normal network delays, without sacrificing performance during periods of synchrony.
• Added a message scheduler to in the chain handlers to prioritize messages more efficiently than FIFO.
• Rate limit inbound requests to reduce CPU based DoS vectors.
• Changed the sampling distribution to sample uniformly by stake. This ensures that validators are correctly sampled based on their stake amount. Previously the sampling would be biased when the staking distribution deviated from uniform.
• Drop connection if heartbeat messages aren't received.
• Updated the network sampling algorithm to be more performant.

PlatformVM updates:

• Converted from an Account based model to a UTXO based model to support pruning.
• Added transaction status lookups.
• Updated API to send transactions directly rather than requiring multiple calls for generating a transaction, signing it, and then issuing it.

AVM updates:

• Supported AVAX asset movement between all chains on the default subnet.
• Added NFT support to the AVM API.

Default subnet:

• Renamed AVA to AVAX to be consistent with the token ticker.
• Converted the address format from the Checksummed Base58 format to the Bech32 format.
• Added fixed transaction fees.

Core updates:

• Updated the shared memory abstraction to avoid potentially breaking failure isolation of the chains.
• Populate the VM context in the RPC VM to enable advanced chain functionality for chains running in a separate process.
• Added value prefixes to node IDs and private keys to be able to clearly distinguish them from addresses and chain IDs.
• Updated the Genesis format to include arbitrary text.

Other changes:

• Added support for the End-To-End testing suite to be able to be run during CI.
• Added additional metrics for database and network monitoring.

Denali Upgrade

This release is compatible with the Denali testnet.

Improvements include:

• Public admin API RPCs are now duplicated to the info endpoint. These duplicated calls are deprecated on the admin API. Once network services (wallet + faucet + explorer) are moved to the info API they'll be removed.
• Security improvements around how open the RPC is and openness of the admin API.
• Security improvements around how we generate staking keys + certs.
• NAT traversal is improved.
• Various improvements were made around reducing memory allocations.
• Removed some duplicated DB writes, which should improve disk IO usage.
• Removed excessive logs dumped from the plugins.
• Rate limit bootstrapping fetches, this should reduce CPU utilization on staking nodes.
• Added new metrics to track poll durations.
• Added early termination conditions to network polls.

Denali Upgrade

This node version is compatible with the AVA incentivized testnet.

• Capped memory consumption by the networking library.
• Removed race condition in the chain router.
• Improved failure isolation of chains.
• Added node version to the admin API.
• Improved logging.

Denali Upgrade

This node version is compatible with the AVA incentivized testnet.

• Fixed bootstrapping vote tallying to properly weight the bootstrap nodes while syncing the P-Chain.
• Fixed incorrect invalid block caching on the P-Chain.
• Improved bootstrapping logging and performance.

Denali Upgrade

This node version is compatible with the AVA incentivized testnet. The client has improved bootstrapping, additional APIs, and various bug fixes.