Status update on the Spica Release🛠️:
After the governance vote in August, we conducted rigorous pentests and several security audits. Critical vulnerabilities were discovered, necessitating urgent fixes. Security is our utmost priority at
#MultiversX, with the safety of funds and maintaining 99.99% availability being non-negotiable. This led to two consecutive security updates, on which we'll provide more details once the audit concludes.
While re-testing post-fixes, we identified inconsistencies related to dyNFTs, requiring immediate patches to ensure reliability. The integration of relayed V3 in explorers and wallets faced some challenges when trying to present it with a good UX. To solve this, some additional handling on the protocol was required which added some complexity to the protocol.
The deal breaker however was the discovery of a certain edge case where the network availability could be degraded. This led us to rethink the design and come up with a much simpler solution that solves all previous issues, and at the same time keeps the benefits of a cheap relayed transaction and much simpler integration than the previous iteration.
With that being said, Spica will go live on testnet next week.
The release schedule after Spica is currently as follows:
➡ Barnard: A new release pending a governance vote, including long-awaited fixes, governance improvements such as enabling voting with LS tokens, delegation improvements for migration between SPs (SP to SP), new opcodes like epochStart information, along with DNS v2 domain activation and other essential updates for Andromeda.
➡ Andromeda: Coming next, this update will eliminate the confirmation blocks, improving finality with a factor of at least 2x.
➡ Sovereign Chains v1 will also be introduced, advancing us towards the configurable chain SDK.
➡ SuperNova: Perhaps the most anticipated release in the last three years, featuring Sub-Second Finality and the introduction of Consensus v3.
For finality-related topics and further context on Andromeda and SuperNova, we are preparing a detailed post with an overview of each change and improvement.
For everyone looking forward to the developer features arriving with Spica, we’re just as eager to see them part of your apps. We're working diligently to roll them out and let you build more user-friendly interactions on the blockchain. We’re also reflecting on areas that can be handled differently to better manage timelines and expectations, and to ultimately just underpromise and overdeliver.
The best way to predict the future is to build it. Lfb!