Overview

Salty Saga 8.1.0 is a hard forking, point release release for Mainnet and is scheduled to fork to hard fork 16 on block 641111 (estimated at October 12th 01:00:00 2020 UTC). All Service Node operators must upgrade to 8.1.x by block 641111 or they will be decommissioned and deregistered by the network.

As of this upgrade, Service Node operators must also update their Loki Storage Service to at-least version 2.0.7 and Lokinet to at-least version 0.8.0 or otherwise risk decommissioning and deregistration. See: https://docs.loki.network/ServiceNodes/DebianPackageGuide/#upgrading for more information.

Major Features

Pulse
The blockchain consensus algorithm shifts to Proof of Stake starting at hard fork 16 replacing Proof of Work. Upgraded Service Nodes will automatically begin participating in Pulse when required and no further intervention is required. For a high level overview see: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-improvement-proposals/blob/master/LIPS/LIP-5.md

As already happens for block checkpointing duties, Service Nodes are required to participate in pulse quorums or risk being deregistered. There is nothing special SN operators need to do: once upgraded your node will automatically begin producing blocks with other Service Nodes as soon as the hard fork block arrives.

Fixed Staking Requirement
The staking requirement for a Service Node decreases to a fixed 15000 LOKI starting from HF16 (a requirement drop from just under 16400 immediately before the hard fork block). See: #1221 for more details.

LNS Lokinet Namespace
At hard fork 16, the Lokinet namespace is open for name registration in LNS. Lokinet names can be purchased for 1, 2, 5, or 10 years and renewed at any point with the following burn requirements.

Lokinet names can be purchased via the CLI wallet i.e.

lns_buy_mapping mywebsitename.loki dw68y1xhptqbhcm5s8aaaip6dbopykagig5q5u1za4c7pzxto77y.loki

For more help (for example, to make a multi-year purchase), see help lns_buy_mapping in the wallet

LNS Lighter Encryption/Pricing Update
Starting from HF16, the price of a Session LNS record will decrease from 20 to 15 Loki.

The encryption scheme for records in LNS has been updated to a faster and more lightweight scheme. Pre-existing LNS records will need to be updated to take advantage of the newer method and is highly recommended. Updates can be done once per name to upgrade their encryption scheme via the CLI wallet, i.e.

lns_update_mapping <record name>

For more help, see help lns_update_mapping in the wallet.

The wallet also now remembers names you've registered

Service Node Credit Retention
Service Nodes now retain their credit on recommissioning depending on the duration of credit consumed whilst decommissioned. For each block whilst decommissioned consumes 2 blocks of available credit when recommissioned.

For example, if you had 1000 blocks of credit and are decommissioned for 150 blocks, you'll get recommissioned with 700 blocks of credit. If you were decommissioned for 500 or more blocks then you'll get decommissioned with 0 blocks of credit.

See: #1204

CLSAG Signatures
From upstream Monero, the new signature scheme reduces transaction size and processing time, see: #1255.

HTTP/JSON RPC Overhaul
A almost complete re-write and overhaul of the HTTP/JSON RPC server in the Daemon improving reliability and performance of communication between the Wallet and Daemon, see: #1208.

Community Contributors

We've had several contributions from community members leading up to this release and we're grateful for the contributions.

• @sarawut11 Rip out configurable decimal places #1280
• @steelslayer091 show_transfers displays column headers #1223
• @javabudd Add mingw unbound to 32/64 bit windows documentation #1238
• @darcys22 Cache lns records #1151
• @darcys22 CMake needs curl on ubuntu to compile #1268

New github branch policy

Starting in this release, we're switching over our default branch for loki-core to the dev branch where all the action happens (i.e. new things for loki 9.x), and we've created a new stable branch that will contain any 8.x updates. Previously the "front page" branch was the master branch, which followed our stable release. If you have your own git clone following the master branch you'll need to switch it to either the stable or dev branch to keep up!

Changelog

We've had over 2200 commits in preparation for Salty Saga with some notable ones listed here.

• Lokinet name registration #1252
• CLSAG signatures #1255
• Fixed Service Node staking requirement of 15,000 LOKI #1221
• Changes to Service Node uptime credits #1204
• Update precomputed block hashes #1290
• Deprecate Monero style keys for Service Nodes #1240
• Fix broken sync timer #1206
• Switch to C++17 #1179
• Blink: Remove deprecated bool blink in wallet RPC interface #1294
• Fix max uint64_t errors when contributing to a reserved spot #1278
• Don't overwrite mainnet lns.db for test suite/fakechain #1249
• Add loki-sn-keys SN key management tool #1241
• Service node contribution fixes #1215

And many, many more commits and bug fixes see: v7.1.10...v8.1.0

Release signatures

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