CODE_COLOR: CODE_YELLOW_MAINNET
RELEASE_VERSION: 1.36.0
PROTOCOL_UPGRADE: TRUE
DATABASE_UPGRADE: TRUE
SECURITY_UPGRADE: TRUE

Protocol Changes

• The support for fixed shards in shard layout was removed. #9219

Protocol Upgrade Voting

This release contains a protocol upgrade. Voting for upgrading to protocol version 63 will start on 2023-11-13 15:00:00 UTC.

Database Upgrade

This release contains a database upgrade. STATE_SYNC_DUMP_KEY and STATE_SNAPSHOT_KEY was added to the BlockMisc column for support of state sync.

Non-protocol Changes

• New option transaction_pool_size_limit in config.json allows to limit the size of the node's transaction pool.
  By default the limit is set to 100 MB. #3284
• Database snapshots at the end of an epoch. This lets a node obtain state parts using flat storage. #9090
• Number of transactions included in a chunk will be lowered if there is a congestion of more than 20000 delayed receipts in a shard. #9222
• Our more efficient and scalable V2 routing protocol is implemented. It shadows the V1 protocol for now while we verify its performance. #9187
• The default config now enables TIER1 outbound connections by default. #9349
• State Sync from GCS is available for experimental use. #9398

Note around node performance

During internal testing of 1.36 we noticed nodes were impacted by a performance degradation manifesting as slowness in producing blocks. This impact was statistical, and the investigation we performed did not reveal any clear indicator of the root cause of this degradation.
In order to better assess this issue, we decided to test the release on testnet. The testnet release so far did not reveal any performance degradation, so we are releasing to mainnet.
After upgrading on mainnet to 1.36, if you get kicked out or notice any performance issue, please reach out to us on the NEAR Validators Telegram channel with data regarding node configuration and performance.