Introducing Witnet 1.1: The Biggest Network Upgrade So Far
By: Adán Sánchez De Pedro
Tags: Witnet, Ethereum, Smart Contracts, Blockchain, Bitcoin

2020 2020 is coming to an end, with lots of memories we might hope to leave firmly in the past.

However, one thing that came to life in 2020 that’s proudly here stay is the Witnet Mainnet. Since it was released on October 14, the network has seen an astonishing growth, with near to 1 million nodes competing for producing blocks and solving data requests.

The number of new features, integrations and ecosystem efforts in the pipeline is huge, and while everyone wants to get them all implemented during 2021, there’s no reason to wait for next year to start making things happen. That’s why the Witnet development community is today announcing Witnet 1.1.

What’s new on 1.1

Witnet 1.1 introduces a number of improvements and critical bug fixes that weren’t able to make it to the witnet-rust master branch by the 1.0 launch.

This upgrade will improve the general stability of the network, and ensure that it’s totally prepared for the first users of the Ethereum <> Witnet Bridge, which we expect to land in the coming months.

Namely, this release enforces an upper bound to the number of data requests that can be processed in parallel, so as to prevent the network from clogging up under high demand — which in the past has caused a couple of “weak consensus” episodes. This protocol change was demanded by some relevant node operators, and gathered positive feedback from the community all through the weeks that it took from initial discussion to final implementation.

This is a clear example of the decentralized ethos that characterizes Witnet: different parties with varying — and sometimes conflicting — interests working together for the advancement of the ecosystem as a whole.

Additionally, the 1.1 upgrade implements a smarter mechanism for the management of transactions in memory. Namely, in the event of block reorganizations, pending transactions are no longer discarded, but rather re-checked for validity, and broadcasted again. No more transactions that disappear mysteriously!

A handful of bug fixes have also been bundled in this release, including within the node CLI and in the component that acts as a backend for the Sheikah Witnet Wallet App.

A Hard Fork Will Take Place on January 22, 2021

Some of the changes that come with 1.1 are consensus-critical changes. That is, a majority of mining nodes in the network need to adopt those breaking changes for them to be effectively enforced.

This procedure is quite standard in other decentralized networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum: any substantial change to the code that validates transactions and blocks causes a “hard fork”, i.e. nodes that don’t apply the new rules will end up in a different version of the network.

But hard forks don’t necessarily need to cause any drama. Through community coordination, hard forks have been successfully executed in both Bitcoin and Ethereum. As long as there’s majority support for the upgrade, and miners are given enough time to upgrade, the risks for the network are minimal.

Given the vast number of nodes we’ve seen the network thus far, the miners will have a whole month to upgrade their nodes before the hard-fork takes place on January 22, 2021 at 9am UTC.

How Do I Upgrade My Node?

Once the 1.1 release is live on GitHub and Docker in the coming days, the upgrade procedure will be the same as during the Testnet phase, as well as for migrating from Testnet to Mainnet. You will simply have to follow these steps that we published back them.

Should I Upgrade Or Should I Not?

As a Witnet miner, there are 3 things you can do:

Upgrade as soon as the release is up in the coming days: you will get all the improvements and bug fixes immediately, but the consensus-critical rules will only be applied from January 22.

you will get all the improvements and bug fixes immediately, but the consensus-critical rules will only be applied from January 22. Wait until just before January 22: you will miss all the improvements and bug fixes for now, but you will find yourself in the 1.1 network as long as you upgrade your nodes by January 22.

you will miss all the improvements and bug fixes for now, but you will find yourself in the 1.1 network as long as you upgrade your nodes by January 22. Totally miss the upgrade: on January 22, you will probably find yourself in a forked network (unless a majority of the miners decide not to upgrade).

At the end of the day, Witnet is a decentralized network, and as such, the developers can’t force the community to adopt a new upgrade. Any community member is free to choose whether they upgrade or not, and in doing so — or refusing to — they manifest their support or rejection for the proposed consensus rules.

Sheikah Is Also Upgrading ✨

The Sheikah Witnet Wallet is also receiving a major update, with version 1.7.1 adding support for all the changes in Witnet 1.1, solving some issues, and premiering a brand new settings menu from which you can now: