v2.5.1

This patch release improves the reliability of message validation and peer discovery on top of v2.5.0, and updates the Go toolchain and dependencies. There are no config or DB changes.

🔐 Upgrade Priority

Network	Priority
Sepolia	🔥 Highly recommended
Hoodi	🔥 Highly recommended
Mainnet	👍 Recommended

⚠️ Always ensure your Execution + Consensus clients and any remote signers (web3signer, external signers) are updated, SSV strives to support latest released versions of these clients.

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🐳 Docker image

docker pull ssvlabs/ssv-node:v2.5.1

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⚠️ Operator notes

• Drop-in upgrade from v2.5.0. No config changes, no DB migration.
• Message validation metric reasons. On ssv.p2p.message.validations.ignored (attribute ssv.p2p.message.validation.discard_reason):
  • New reason slot is too far in the future, for messages whose slot is more than 3 epochs past the current slot.
  • The late-slot reason now lists every role it covers. It changes from current time is above duty's start +34(committee, aggregator, and aggregator committee) or +3(proposer, sync committee contribution) slots to current time is above duty's start +34 (committee, aggregator, aggregator committee), +3 (proposer, sync committee contribution, PTC attestation) or +2 (proposer preferences) slots. Update any dashboard or alert that matches the old text.
• Prometheus /metrics output. With the OpenTelemetry update, the exporter no longer emits the otel_scope_info series and adds an otel_scope_schema_url label to every series. Metric names and suffixes are unchanged. Update any query or recording rule that joins on otel_scope_info or expects an exact label set.
• Building from source. go.mod now pins toolchain go1.26.10. With the default GOTOOLCHAIN=auto, an older Go 1.26.x downloads it automatically.

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What's Changed

Message validation

• Messages whose slot is more than 3 epochs ahead of the current slot are now ignored early, under the new slot is too far in the future reason. Results for all other messages are unchanged.
• Improved error handling in message validation.
• Cleanup of slot-time helpers: the duplicate TimeAtSlot is removed.
• The late-slot error and the related code comments now spell out each role's bound, including PTC attestation (+3) and proposer preferences (+2).
• More validation test coverage across all roles, message types and fork configs.

PRs: #3172, #3173

P2P & discovery

• ENR domaintype and next_domaintype entries are now decoded strictly as 4 bytes, matching how SSV and Anchor nodes encode them. Other values are skipped as invalidDomainType.
• Improved error handling in peer discovery.
• More discovery and ENR decoding tests.

PRs: #3174, #3175

Build / CI / dependencies

• Go toolchain pinned to go1.26.10, and release images are now built with it (previously golang:1.26.0).
• Dependency updates: gRPC v1.83.2, OpenTelemetry v1.45.0 with its exporters and contrib aligned (Prometheus exporter v0.67.0, otelhttp v0.70.0, semconv v1.43.0), chi v5.3.2, golang.org/x/crypto v0.58.0, golang.org/x/net v0.62.0 and the rest of golang.org/x, go-ipld-prime v0.23.0, brotli v1.2.7 and klauspost/compress v1.20.2.
• ssv-signer: dependencies matched to the node, and fasthttp v1.70.0, which parses HTTP headers more strictly (CRLF line endings only, exactly one Host header, URI format checks). The node's client is unaffected.
• CI: go test concurrency tuned for GitHub's hosted runners, and a faster max-validators spec test.
• Renovate: stage's config now applies (weekly schedule, grouped updates, Go toolchain and golang images bumped together).

PRs: #3176, #3177, #3178, #3179, #3180, #3181

Full Changelog

v2.5.0...v2.5.1