Overview

This release introduces consensus participation incentives natively in the Algorand Protocol. Payout percentages, Min/Max Balance requirements, validator behavior thresholds, and more can be found here.

What's New

• Ability for consensus participants to opt-in to incentives
• Automatic heartbeat functionality to help well behaving incentive-eligible nodes stay online
• Mimc opcodes to make it easier to build zero knowledge proof applications on Algorand

Protocol Upgrade

This release contains a protocol upgrade.

Changelog

Enhancements

• AVM: new teal opcodes for the MiMC hash function to support Zero Knowledge Proofs (#5978)
• Build(deps): bump golang.org/x/crypto from 0.29.0 to 0.31.0 (#6203)
• Catchpoints: Add onlineaccounts and onlineroundparamstail tables to snapshot files (#6177)
• Consensus: Consensus version v40, set major release to 4 and reset minor. (#6207)
• Eval: Feature/heartbeats (#6189)
• Refactor: replace experimental maps and slices with stdlib (#6179)

Bugfixes

• Doc: voter balance version fix (#6205)
• Ledger: add callback to clear state between commitRound retries (#6190)

Other

• Chore: fix some problematic function names (#6184)
• Chore: fix some function name in comment (#6192)

Additional Resources

• Algorand Forum
• Developer Documentation