Update on Celo's Espresso Hardfork: v1.5.1 and Pushing Back Activation Date

Mainnet
1

Dear Validators and Node Operators,

During the last few days celo-blockchain chain was able to fix two important issues that were affecting 1.5.0 and 1.4.x versions

  1. V1.5.0 suffered from a memory leak that made it unsafe
  2. V1.4.x and v1.5.0 included a change that made uptime score monitoring unreliable, thus many validators experienced missing signatures

For that, today we are releasing v1.5.1 and v1.4.2 fixing these issues.

Given that the Espresso Hardfork requires v1.5.x nodes whose update was delayed due to the memory leak and also taking into account recent feedback from validators on having enough time to test the new version prior to activation, we are pushing back the activation date to block number 11838440 on date March 8th, 12:15 PST. This will provide every node operators more time to do the upgrade and internal testing of the new version.

So, if you’re running node, these are the recommended next steps:

If you’re running version 1.5.0, we recommend either to:

  1. Upgrade to 1.5.1 (which addresses the memory leak)
  2. Add the flag --override.espresso 11838440 on your 1.5.0 environment, to manually specify the fork block, overriding the previously defined block number

If you’re running version 1.4.1 (or earlier), we recommend either to:

  1. Upgrade immediately to 1.4.2, do your internal QA on 1.5.1 and then upgrade to 1.5.1
  2. Upgrade directly to 1.5.1 if you feel confident about it.

Important Note: If you’re running 1.5.0 and want to consider downgrading to 1.4.2, take into consideration that database format has changed and you’ll have to either resync or use a 1.4.x chain backup for the validator.

Thank you for helping us with testing and giving us all the valuable feedback. More importantly, thank you for keeping the Celo network secure.

The cLabs team

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