v1.5.0-rc1 - 2025-06-09

This is a release candidate for Charon's v1.5.0 release. Feedback is welcome and appreciated, please use github issues or discord if you have trouble with this release.

Notable user-facing features shipping in this release include:

• A breaking change to the default behaviour for attestation and aggregation on-chain inclusion checking. Previously Charon checked for proposal, attestation and aggregation duties on-chain after the fact, but post-electra we've observed this to be an expensive operation that might unduly hurt the cluster's performance. As a result, the default behaviour for Charon now is to check for on chain inclusion for proposals only. Users can opt-in to continue monitoring on-chain inclusion for attestations and aggregations by adding attestation_inclusion to the --feature-set-enable flag. Monitoring will now consider attestations successful if Charon receives a successful response from their beacon node during broadcast. However a successful broadcast of an attestation (or aggregation) does not guarantee that the attestation will be included by an aggregator (or proposer) later in the slot.
• Beacon node call timings and retries were revisited and reduced in some cases, in order to lower the load Charon puts on a beacon node.
• A new optional feature flag proposal_timeout has been introduced. This flag increases the first round timeout for proposals from 1.0s to 1.5s. This has been added because it is common for MEV-relays to delay bid responses in an effort to maximise rewards, leaving too little time to achieve consensus in a one second window. If a cluster wants to leverage this feature, all nodes should apply the flag. Caution should be used with this flag, as it leaves a very short window for a second leader to achieve consensus on an alternative header, if the first leader is offline. It is recommended to only use this feature if encouraged by the core team.
• Charon now supports TLS/HTTPS connections from validator clients, consult the documentation on the feature here.
• Charon now listens to the server sent events endpoint of the beacon nodes for head events and re-org events and exposes them to monitoring. This is useful for identifying slow beacon nodes to optimise performance and duty scheduling.
• Charon is now compatible with the Grandine consensus layer client and Vouch validator client. Both are part of our simulation testing environment.
• Obol now provides compiled executables for Charon as part of its release process. You can find them attached to this release as artifacts.

Read the rest of the release notes for more:

Full Changelog: v1.4.3..v1.5.0-rc1

Feature

• Improve consensus timings #3430 (#3739)
• Listen to the beacon node SSE endpoint and expose via prom metrics #3580 (#3756,#3666,#3759, #3737)
• Remove v1 attestation/aggregation calls post electra #3645 (#3727,#3676)
• Add SSZ support for builder endpoint #3724 (#3726)
• Keep a regex for minimum CL versions we support, and emit a startup/occasional warning log if its condition is not met #2922 (#3723)
• Change default gas limit to 60m #3788 (#3789)
• Secure and Simplify Import of .charon Folders for DappNode Integration #2978 (#3757)
• Revisiting BN calls and retry settings #3671 (#3721)
• Implement Fallback Beacon Node Selection for Charon #3328 (#3667)
• Add TLS/HTTPS to the validatorAPI #1634 (#3651, #3662)
• Optimized genesis and spec fetching (#3716)
• Check for attestation inclusion only under feature flag (#3740)

Bug

• Fix PRs parsings (#3653)
• Fix loaded keys ordering (#3655 )
• Create tracer only when configured (#3704)
• Add fork version support for MEV test (#3733)
• Scheduler edge case (#3762)

Misc

• Added app_eth2_requests_total metric (#3715)
• Add WithForkVersion to definition (#3718)
• Use maps.copy for cleaner map handling (#3722)
• Add missing entries to release template and stacksnipe (#3725)
• Minor scheduler improvements (#3735)
• Change exit sign default epoch from 162304 to 194048 (#3785)

Compatibility Matrix

This release of Charon is backwards compatible with Charon v1.0.*, v1.1.*, v1.2.0, v1.3.*, v1.4.* Though only v1.3.* and newer are Pectra-ready.

The below matrix details a combination of beacon node (consensus layer) + validator clients and their corresponding versions the DV Labs team have tested with this Charon release. More validator and consensus client will be added to this list as they are supported in our automated testing framework.

Legend

• ✅: All duties succeed in testing;
• 🟡: All duties succeed in testing, except non-penalised duties;
• 🟠: One or more penalised duties may fail occasionally;
• 🔴: One or more penalised duties fail consistently;
• ❗: Remark regarding certain VC, CL or specific combination. Hover to reveal.

What's Changed

• *: fix PRs parsing (#3653)

• cmd: fixed loaded keys ordering (#3655)

• app: combined service.name (#3657)

• *: fixed tls options for vapi (#3662)

• testutil: use slices.Contains to simplify code (#3668)

• dutydb: electra aggregation hotfix (#3686)

• dutydb: electra aggregation hotfix (#3690)

• app: remove check for unexisting v2 endpoint (#3695)

• tracker: check inclusion by validx, instead of agg bits (#3696)

• app: ssz marshal validx (#3697)

• tracker: fix inclusion attester duty check (#3700)

• core: fix incompatibility between v1.3/4.1 and v1.3/4.2 (#3702)

• app: create tracer only when configured (#3704)

• tracker: check for available validator index in inclusions (#3705)

• *: recover from missing validator index (#3708)

• *: added app_eth2_requests_total metric (#3715)

• *: optimized genesis and spec fetching (#3716)

• cluster: add WithForkVersion to definition (#3718)

• *: use maps.copy for cleaner map handling (#3722)

• *: add missing entries to release template and stacksnipe (#3725)

• cmd: add fork version support for MEV test (#3733)

• deps: bump cryptology to v0.1.0 (#3734)

• *: minor scheduler improvements (#3735)

• *: sse refactoring (#3737)

• docs: replaced broken link intro (#3738)

• *: check for attestation inclusion only under feature flag (#3740)

• app/sse: better events logging (#3759)

• core/scheduler: bugfix (#3762)

• chore: edited the license badge (#3766)

• cmd: change exit sign default epoch from 162304 to 194048 (#3785)

• app/eth1wrap_test: fix flaky tests (#3787)

• app: bump to v1.5-rc (#3791)