2021-08 Parameter Update Proposal

[kostko]

In order to prepare the Mainnet for the upcoming deployment of the Cipher ParaTime there's a few parameters that should be updated on Mainnet and were missed during the Cobalt Upgrade. We have released Oasis Core 21.2.8 which contains an upgrade handler (consensus-params-update-2021-08) that performs the required updates once the upgrade has been approved via on-chain governance.

The proposed parameter changes are as follows:

• staking.max_allowances specifies the maximum number of allowances on account can store. It will be set to 16 (default value is 0) to enable support for beneficiary allowances which are required to transfer tokens into a ParaTime.
• staking.gas_costs, governance.gas_costs and roothash.gas_costs specify gas costs for various types of staking, governance and roothash transactions. Gas costs for transactions that were missing gas costs will be added.
• scheduler.max_validators is the maximum size of the consensus committee (i.e. the validator set). It will be increased to 110 (it was set to 100 previously).

The upgrade proposal has been submitted on chain as proposal 1 to be approved via consensus layer governance introduced in the Cobalt upgrade (see below for timeline and voting instructions).

Testing

The Oasis Core 21.2.x series has been released in June 2021 and has been running on the Testnet for the past two months. It does not contain any consensus-breaking changes and is thus fully compatible with the currently running Mainnet. There has been 8 patch releases with bugfixes mostly related to ParaTime nodes. No serious issues related to the consensus layer have been discovered. Release 21.2.8 has been made to include the proposed upgrade handler that may be activated via on-chain governance.

In order to ensure that the upgrade handler will not cause any problems in the operation of the network, the Testnet has already been upgraded to Oasis Core 21.2.8 and will be executing exactly the same upgrade handler in order to test the upgrade well in advance of the proposed Mainnet upgrade time.

The Testnet upgrade has already been proposed and is currently planned for epoch 8844 which will happen on Aug 11th around 8:50 UTC.

Proposed Steps

We have already released Oasis Core 21.2.8 which contains the appropriate upgrade handler. The release is otherwise compatible with the consensus protocol that is running on Mainnet so the upgrade of the binary itself can be performed at any time in advance of the actual network upgrade.

The proposed timeline is as follows:

• 2021-06-07: Oasis Core 21.2 released and deployed on the Testnet.
• 2021-08-09: Oasis Core 21.2.8 released with the proposed upgrade handler included.
• 2021-08-09: Testnet validators asked to upgrade to Oasis Core 21.2.8.
• 2021-08-10: Testnet governance proposal submitted on chain (proposal ID 3).
• 2021-08-10: Mainnet upgrade proposal published in text form.
• 2021-08-11: Testnet upgrade with the same upgrade handler.
• 2021-08-17: Mainnet governance proposal submitted on chain (proposal ID 1).
• 2021-08-24: Voting period ends (epoch 7876).
• 2021-08-31: Approximate time of upgrade (epoch 8049).

Please review the instructions for preparing your system and what to do at the time of upgrade and the changelog. If you have already upgraded to Oasis Core 21.2.8 you only need to restart your node after the network stops for upgrade in order to apply the upgrade. NO state wipe is required and the genesis document hash / chain identifier will remain the same.

Voting on Governance Proposals

If you are a Mainnet validator entity, please see the following instructions on how to vote on the governance proposal. The governance proposal described in this document has been submitted on chain as a proposal of type upgrade with the following content (upgrade descriptor) as proposal ID 1.

Proposal content:

{
   "v": 1,
    "handler": "consensus-params-update-2021-08",
    "target": {
        "consensus_protocol": {
            "major": 4
        },
        "runtime_host_protocol": {
            "major": 3
        },
        "runtime_committee_protocol": {
            "major": 2
        }
    },
    "epoch": 8049
}