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Ecosystem Updates

Orchid Network Upgrade Announcement

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Orchid Network Upgrade Announcement

The RSK network will be undergoing a planned network upgrade at block number 729,000. This is expected to happen on Saturday, September 8th, 2018. RSK Testnet network upgrade will happen at block number 802,000, expected on Friday, September 7th, 2018.

What is a network upgrade ?

A network upgrade is a change or group of changes to the protocol consensus rules, which are activated at a defined block number. As a consequence, if you adhere to these changes, please upgrade to the new client version before the network upgrade is activated. Otherwise, the non-updated node will remain on an incompatible chain.

How do I upgrade ?

Download and update your RSKj node to Orchid v0.5.0. before the upgrade is activated. This release has already been made available in our Github repo.

What changes are included in Orchid ?

This is a summary of the changes included in this version:

  • Performance and scalability improvements in Remasc native contract
  • 2-way-peg unlimited whitelisting support
  • Bridge methods local calls restrictions
  • Bridge block locator performance improvements
  • EXTCODESIZE support for native contracts
  • New opcode STATICCALL

You can find a complete list of the changes introduced in the corresponding Github milestone.

Version 0.5.0 release’s sha256 sum is e85a791b70be0986baab8b5dfd1bd6edcdd03b8e5329d668ff71b645ed794fa4 rskj-core-0.5.0-ORCHID-all.jar. See Reproducible Build guide for further details.

How do I report security vulnerabilities ?

If you find a security issue, please contact us at security@rsk.co, or report it through our bug bounty program. We reward security experts, software developers and hackers who dedicate time and effort to improve the RSK platform.

Do you have further questions ?

Please reach out with any feedback you would like to share with us, you can contact us directly on our Discord or directly through creating issues in our Github repository.

If you are new to RSK, you may want to check our Starting with RSK guide and Smart Contracts quick start tutorial to find out how to start working on the RSK platform

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