MANDATORY UPDATE by December 31, 2020

Release Notes - Hard Fork Update.

This mandatory upgrade includes several enhancements, bug fixes, and establishes a new testnet.

🎁 Features

Major Features

• Staking Vaults (Along with endpoints to fund/defund vaults and require minimum vault deposits [antispam])
• Uniform Lotteries (No Address Repetition)
• MN remote broadcast & MN remote start

Minor Features

• Lottery Data now viewable per block height
• Improved Randomness for Proof-of-Stake generation
• No more needing to restart node for MintableCoins to switch from false to true
• Autocombine stakes can now be disabled in the configs by setting -autocombine=0
• Stake split threshold (100k default) needs to be set in the divi.conf file
• Other changes

🎉 Enhancements

• Improved validation of masternode pings & masternode broadcasts
• Lightened block index by removing redundant lottery data
• Added tests for OP_META transactions
• Optimize timestamp selection for proof-of-stake
• MN blockhash based reward attribution caching for reduced memory footprint
• Re-enabled python test frameworks for quality assurance
• Grouping settings parameters into a settings class
• Loads of automated Testing & Refactoring

Description

• Staking Vaults:
  Allow delegation of the ability to construct proofs-of-stake to an exclusive third party in a trustless way. One use case is to have two people who know each other to stake on the same node without giving up ultimate control of their funds.

• Uniform Lotteries:
  In the hope of making lottery rewards more uniform, addresses that have previously won a lottery reward will not be eligible for the next four lotteries. They will resume being considered for a lottery reward afterwards.

• Remote Start:
  Allows the server on which a masternode is hosted to use their own keys for managing the masternode. The user can now locally pledge the funds with a signature instead of needing to provide a private key.

• Remote Broadcast:
  Allows delegation of the broadcast step when creating a masternode in order to allow a more streamlined deployment UX

Notes

#This is a Hard Fork update!

Nodes should both (1) remove the mncache.dat & mnpayments.dat from their data directory, and (2) start up with -reindex if running this daemon for the first time. The updates to the masternodes and block indices can trigger an error if disk files are not regenerated by the daemon; hence the indicated steps 1 & 2.