In Hedera Services 0.19, we are thrilled to announce migration of the Hedera smart contract service to the Hyperledger Besu EVM, as laid out in HIP-26. This enables support for the latest v0.8.9 Solidity contracts, and harmonizes our gas schedule with that of the "London" hard fork. The Besu migration also sets the stage for a step change in smart contract performance on Hedera.
Two other HIPs targeting the Hedera Token Service go live in this release. First, the HIP-23 feature set is now enabled, so that any account that has been configured with a non-zero maxAutoAssociations can receive air-drops (i.e., units or NFTs of a token type without explicit association). Second, we have also implemented HIP-24, which provides a safety measure for token types created with a pauseKey. If a TokenPause is submitted with this key's signature, then all operations on the token will be suspended until a subsequent TokenUnpause.
Contributors
We'd like to thank all the contributors who worked on this release!