Cardano Node 1.13.0

This release completes the development of many core Shelley features and provides basic Shelley functionality for stake pools and delegation. It delivers new CLI commands for obtaining Shelley stake pool information and creating MIR certificates, a new network KeepAlive mini-protocol. It also prepares the Cardano blockchain for the Byron-to-Shelley hard fork operational change that will deactivate Byron mode and will enable the Shelley decentralised mode. This release also includes improvements in existing Shelley CLI commands, as well as in KES and VRF cryptographic key processing, Praos chain selection and hard fork implementation. In addition, logging, tracing, error messages and documentation have been improved, and a few outstanding issues have been fixed, notably, an issue that was causing high CPU usage on MacOS.

The Shelley features have been pre-released for public testing and review on the Cardano Shelley Testnet.
They are not available in the Byron mode, and are, therefore, deactivated on the Cardano mainnet.

Deployed on the Shelley testnet on 5 June 2020.
Deployed on the mainnet on 9 June 2020.

New features

• New commands in the node CLI:
  • to query stake addresses, balance and delegation (#1053, #1129)
  • to get the stake pool id (#1069)
  • to create MIR certificates (#1075)
• New KeepAlive network mini-protocol (#2175)
• New monitoring metric for KES key periods, including remaining ones (#1030, #1144)
• New local ledger state query to get the current state of stake addresses, namely, their reward account balance, and current delegation choice (if any) (#2161)

Improvements

• Changed the Shelley CLI command and flag names to be more consistent (#1068)
• Improved logging for mempool transaction validation failures (#1035)
• Added logging of the epoch number as well as the slot number (#1108)
• Fixed logging of node information on startup (#1122)
• Extended tracing for benchmarking analysis (#1091)
• Improved human readable error messages for Shelley commands (#1021)
• Improved error message for transaction input parser errors (#1066)
• Updated Making Shelley blockchain from scratch documentation (#1062)
• Improved hard fork implementation (#2139, #2150, #2151, #2152, #2158, #2165, #2177, #2183, #2192, #2199)
• Prepared for the Byron-to-Shelley hard-fork (#2163, #2145, #2182, #2185, #2187)
• Changed the Praos protocol chain selection rule to be deterministic based on the chain values (using the leader VRF key) rather than relying on the order of arrival; this reduces network node congestion (#2195)
• Evolved the KES keys eagerly rather than on-demand (#2160)
• Distinguished cases when a node should be slot leader, but cannot forge (#2169, #2171, #2172, #2176, #2193)
• Improved tracing of block forging, and forge errors (#2168, #2170)
• Increased the header size estimate to avoid ingress queue overruns (#2206)
• Shelley ledger changes:
  • Provided delegators a whole epoch to react to pool parameter changes (#1494)
  • Included the VRF key in the hash-to-genesis delegation mapping (#1495, #1501)
  • Changed MIR certificates so they can now draw from either the treasury, or reserves (#1513)
  • MIR certificates are witnessed by the genesis delegates, not genesis keys (#1513)
  • Dropped the use of the "set" tag from the CDDL (#1505)
  • Improved to use the right binary format for stake addresses (#1491)
  • Included the network id in addresses (by value, not type) (#1487)
  • Documented the network id and binary format in the specification (#1500)

Resolved issues

• Fixed high CPU usage on MacOS (#770)
• Fixed override order for the node socket: first CLI, then config file (#1124, #1145)
• Fixed error handling on genesis file parse errors (#1134)
• Fixed various issues with Live View (#1076, #1126)
• Fixed the parsing of the pool margin in pool registration certificates (#1063, #1110)
• Fixed mempool issues (#1498, #2006)
• Fixed long thread delays on 32bit systems more widely (#2135, #2162)
• Fixed Praos stability window calculations (#2201, #2202, #2219, #2220)
• Fixed off-by-one error in pool retirement epoch in both, Shelley ledger specification and code (#1511)

Known Issues

• Incorrect constant value for epochSlots in validate-cbor command (#848)
• cardano-cli does not have description of the new, Shelley relevant, commands (#1071)

Shelley testnet-specific Issues (not mainnet)

• Some block divergence and performance issues (#1196,#1214,#1216,#1218)
• Many new CLI features are in progress (https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node/projects/3)

Documentation

• Cardano CLI
• Internal API docs for ledger, consensus and network
• Making a Shelley blockchain from scratch
• Shelley testnet tutorial

Platforms

• Linux 64-bit, Windows 64 bit

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