Release Notes v1.6.0

Recommended CLI Version: v2.0.2+
Validator: Required by Aug 1st, 2023
Fullnode: Required by Aug 1st, 2023
Docker: aptos-node-v1.6.0

New features and enhancements

General

The aptos-core repository dependency was upgraded to use rust version 1.70.0 from 1.66.1.

Storage

AIP-38: The storage gas curves were deprecated, and IO gas prices were stabilized by decoupling the storage fee from gas pricing. This will remove fluctuations in gas pricing caused by an increase in global state storage.

Networking

Performance: The networking stack has been updated to perform message deserialization in parallel. This helps to improve networking performance and latencies under high load.

State sync

Configuration: The default configuration for mainnet nodes has been updated to use fast sync to account for the onset of data pruning on mainnet. New nodes can now be synchronized to the most recent state of mainnet without any manual configuration.

Mempool

AIP-34 (Unit Gas Price Estimation): The unit gas price estimation API has been redesigned to provide clients with an estimate of the unit gas price they should use when the blockchain is overloaded. This ensures a transaction's execution within a reasonable amount of time.

AIP-39 (Gas fee payer): The blockchain now supports adding an optional gas fee payer account to a transaction that will pay the transaction cost on behalf of the sender.
AIP-28 (Partial voting for on-chain governance): Delegation stake pools can vote on a proposal with a portion of its voting power. Delegators in a delegation pool can use their voting power either to create proposals or to vote on them.
AIP-36 (Aptos Unique Identifiers): Decouple unique identifier creation from account and object states. The new APIs allow for implicitly parallel creation of unique identifiers, and consequently, objects and tokens: generate_unique_address, object::create_object, and token::create_token.

Fixed the gas cost for several cryptographic hash functions where the cost multiplier was missing.