There’s been a lot of activity these last few weeks. If you’re compiling from source you’ll probably notice difficulties syncing with the Dibbler testnet. This is because there are a lot of new features in development. Minor fixes for Dibbler will still be implemented on the testnet-dibbler branch. If you want to try out some of the latest features in development, start the base node, wallet and other apps with the CLI arguments --network igor to use the Igor testnet.

Some exciting features in development:

1. Bulletproofs is getting replaced by Bulletproof+. This saves on some data, but more importantly will enable batch verification which speeds up Initial Block Download and syncing the blockchain.
2. The contract and constitution management of sidechain committees. For more details, see the RFC

Some other features committed recently:

Features

• add encrypted_value to the UnblindedOutput (#4142) (f79d383)
• add FeePerGramStats to ffi library (#4114) (234d32f)
• console-wallet: add contract-definition init command (#4164) (8685e2f)
• constitution publishing (#4150) (ba83b8f)
• contract acceptance publication (#4151) (d3d3e91)
• core: add contract acceptance utxo features (#4145) (2636cb5)
• core: add side-chain features and constitution to UTXOs (#4134) (ada3143)
• core: adds constitution UTXO features (#4121) (da5696a)
• core: define OutputFlags for side-chain contracts (#4088) (50993a3)
• core: impl consensus encoding for bool (#4120) (682aa5d)
• daily-tests: use environment variable to set custom seed words (#4086) (3773bba)
• scan base node for constitutions (#4144) (310a2d2)
• wallet_ffi: new ffi method to create covenant (#4115) (dd65b4b)
• wallet_ffi: new ffi method to create output features (#4109) (f8fa3ec)
• wallet: add help for wallet cli commands (#4162) (859b7d3)
• wallet: new command to publish a contract definition transaction (#4133) (b4991a4)

Bug Fixes

• better message for failed software update check (#4100) (f33a503)
• block-sync: check coinbase maturity (#4168) (38b4af7)
• ci: sort .license.ignore locally before diff (#4106) (8594754)
• comms: commit to public key and nonce in identity sig (#3928) (5ac6133)
• core: don’t allow coinbase transactions in mempool (#4103) (46450d5)
• dht: fixes MAC related key vuln for propagated cleartext msgs (#3907) (1e96d45)
• dht: optimisation, no decrypt if public key dest doesn’t match (#4131) (987972c)
• hash in cucumber (#4124) (5d7d55d)
• hotstuff: fix bug where decide state was listening for wrong message (#4160) (fe7b304)
• integration_test: fix wallet-cli integration tests (#4132) (4464064)
• move peer dbs into sub folders (#4147) (2b1a69a)