The Provable team is happy to announce a new version of the snarkOS Aleo implementation. Aleo is a cryptocurrency enabling developers to build cryptographically secure dApps.
You can already use this version on testnet (build from source on the commit d269988) - it is planned to land on mainnet by February 11th, 2025, when v3.3.0 will also be available as a release from GitHub.
Please report any issues you might come across!
What's new in v3.3.0
snarkVM Consensus Changes: increase to 25 validators
A consensus update is going to take place, allowing the validator count to increase to 25! Extensive load-testing was performed to confirm the robustness of the larger network. In future releases, the validator set will continue to increase in a responsible manner. Excitingly, due to the use of the Bullshark-based AleoBFT consensus algorithm, this increased validator set will increase the throughput of Aleo to around 50 transactions per second!
The consensus changes will occur at the following block heights:
Canary - Block 4,560,000 (~Jan 25, 2025 at the current 4s block times)
Testnet - Block 4,800,000 (~Jan 31, 2025 at the current 3.4s block times)
Mainnet - Block 4,900,000 (~Feb 18, 2025 at the current 3.0s block times)
ATTENTION: Validators that do not upgrade in time will be at risk of forking and require manual intervention. Clients that do not upgrade will be at risk of halting until an upgrade occurs.
Syncing close to tip many times faster
Whenever a validator or client is lagging behind, they request blocks from other peers. This process had a subtle bug which caused many seconds of delay on fresh requests. Now that this has been fixed, syncing will be multiple times faster. (PR).
Other changes
Previously, the 'snarkos developer scan' command was broken because it used an outdated endpoint internally. This is now fixed (PR).
Various performance and documentation improvements were included, such as adding a cache for block requests (PR). Validators will consume slightly more memory, but this should be offset in the near future by deployments no longer being held in memory (WIP PR).
This release, there is no update required for Leo, the programming language allowing you to write, deploy and execute programs on Aleo. Several exciting updates are underway, so stay tuned.
Contributors to v3.3.0
A big thank you to all the contributors to v3.3.0!
@acoglio
@d0cd
@ljedrz
@kaxxa123
@kpandl
@niklaslong
@raychu86
@vicsn