V20 Lydia — Release Candidate 1. Available today on the beta network
By: Zach Hyatt
Tags: Protocol, Bitcoin, Nano, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain

V20 Lydia — Release Candidate 1

Available today on the beta network

Over the past few months Lydia has been making plenty of appearances on the beta network in the form of development builds — a total of 19 of them to be exact! Our supportive community members have been testing, analyzing and suggesting improvements all through this process and thanks to them we are proud to announce that the 20th build of V20 released on the beta network will be a true Release Candidate.

Stable for services testing

In previous release cycles we have pushed out “Release Candidate” builds which were not feature complete, but with Lydia we performed early testing through development builds so V20 RC1 is more stable and ready for integration testing by services.

We encourage all services to join us on the beta network to try out V20 early. For details on the key features to test out on beta and for planning migration activities, head over to the Migration and Beta Testing section for V20 in our docs.

Getting various node configurations and setups trying out these features will be a big help in identifying any potential issues before the final release.

Bringing the features

Beyond the items covered in the migration details linked above, this build also has the following updates worth noting:

Experimental support for RocksDB, a new database backend

Infrastructure for supporting a transition to a new PoW algorithm in a future release

Improvements in handling transactions on both the live and bootstrap networks to reduce resource usage

More details on these updates can be found in the following articles:

Everyone help us test

This release is getting us closer to the final launch of V20 and the more help we get in testing it, regardless of whether you’re running a service or not, the sooner we can get the improvements out to the main network for everyone to take advantage of.

We want to give a HUGE thank you to those who have tested all 19 of the development builds to date — so many improvements and insights have come from those activities and we are hoping it makes this Release Candidate testing process go smoothly.

If you wish to participate in testing on the beta network, please visit https://docs.nano.org/running-a-node/beta-network/ for all the details including setup instructions, build options and test cases. We also want to encourage you to join the #beta-net channel on Discord where most of the activity around testing is coordinated. You even get a “Beta Testers” role if you participate there!

For those who have helped beta test in previous versions, but not in V20, please note that the beta network was reset back in August with a new genesis account. This means that older beta keys will no longer have a balance and to join you’ll need to remove your existing ledger, upgrade your node and get some beta Nano from the beta faucet or another member on Discord.

And once again we want to thank everyone who has followed along with Lydia to get us this far, and give a shout out to those who will be jumping in to help with our Release Candidates!

Changelog

Full Changelog

Major Changes: