Oxen 9.1.1 ("Audacious Aurochs")

The new 9.1.1* release is a mandatory upgrade introducing several new features aimed at making service node operators lives easier, as well as supporting a slew of network updates for Lokinet, Storage Server, and Session.

This new release is mandatory and must be installed before block 785'000, due on 29 April, 22:45 (UTC).

(* - if you already installed the 9.1.0 release, we discovered an issue with it shortly after release: please upgrade to 9.1.1 as soon as possible!)

New Oxen core features:

• ONS wallet registrations: beginning at the hardfork you can start registering ONS wallet names (such as "gandalf") that point to a wallet address ("L6JASonXYZ...") so that you'll be able to use the registered short name instead of your much longer wallet address. These names will initially be usable only when using a "trusted" (i.e. local) oxend, for security, but we are working on designing wallet improvements that can make them securely usable by all wallets in the future. Like Session names, wallet registrations are one-time fees that do not expire. (And if you already have a registered Session name, don't worry: only you are permitted to register a wallet with the same name).

• ONS fee reductions: At the hardfork, the ONS fee for Session registrations, the new wallet names, and Lokinet names will drop to 7 OXEN (down from 15).

• Tx fee reductions: starting at the hard fork, we are reducing the basic per-output fee by 75%, and reducing the blink per-output fee by 70%. That means a typical small, single-recipient transactions will cost just over 0.01 OXEN, and a single-recipient blink will cost a little over 0.03 OXEN (down from 0.04 and 0.1 currently).

• Service nodes now periodically send the time around to other service nodes, to help operators diagnose when time may be out of sync. (Being too far out of sync can be a cause for service node deregistration as service nodes will be unwilling to participate in pulse quorums or accept new blocks).

• Decommissions and deregistrations now include a "reason" flag in the decommission/deregistration transaction: this indicates why the quorum decided to decommission or deregister a node which can be extremely helpful diagnosing potential problems. One of the most common questions when a deregistration happens is "why did this happen?" and it is often guesswork to figure it out: but with Audacious Aurochs you can now see the reason(s) by just looking up the decommission transaction. (Here are some examples from the testnet).

• Storage server's interaction with oxend is completely rewritten, in particular with respect to storage server testing. Storage server now reports test results much more frequently and right away which significantly improves the diagnostics available for storage server reachability problems.

Other Service Node components

Both Lokinet and the Oxen Storage Server also receive significant updates in this release, with new 0.9.0 and 2.1.0 releases, respectively, and allow us to continue growing the Oxen network, allowing updates that you will see rolling out over the upcoming months.

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