About this release

This is the first Iris release candidate.

It:

• Fixed buggy serialization of contract information - this means the compiler version is actually stored on chain, and isn't replaced by "unknown".

• Added AENS.update to FATE VM

• Added AENS.lookup and Oracle.expiry lookup functions to FATE VM

• Fixed bug regarding TTL of preclaims in FATE VM - it was incorrectly always set to 0, from VM_FATE_SOPHIA_2 it has the correct value.

• Fixed a bug in AENS.resolve in FATE VM - for invalid names VM_FATE_SOPHIA_1 will crash. From VM_FATE_SOPHIA_2 it will not crash, rather return None.

• Changed Chain.block_hash - in VM_FATE_SOPHIA_2 it will return Some(<blockhash>) for Chain.block_height (i.e. current generation) previously it returned None. With Bitcoin-NG we do have the block hash of the current generation, so no reason not to allow this.

• Extended AENS name max expiration time from 50000 generations (~100 days) to 180000 generations (~375 days).

• Changed how a meta transaction TTL's is being validated: so far it used to be the outermost transaction's ttl that was taken into account, now it is the innermost one instead. Meta transactions no longer have TTL.

• Fixed a protocol issue: a valid force progress call with invalid CallData or failing call would result in on-chain transaction but tokens from the caller would still be moved to the forced contract. This is fixed and failed calls in successful force progress transactions result in rollback of the off-chain balances.

• Improved the functionality of State Channel delegates: now they can provide channel_solo_snapshot_tx as well. This is really handy in cases one party is missing and the other is doing malicious force progress on-chain while the channel is still open.

• Revisited the State Channel delegates: so far they were a shared list for both participants. From Iris on, delegates are per peer: there is a list of delegates for the initiator and another one for the responder. Old channel objects can still be used but users are strongly recommended to reset their delegates list if they had any. Note that the HTTP representations are changed accordingly.

• Allowed delegates to force progress on behalf of the user that authorized them to do so.

• Improved garbage collector for all Fate contracts form Iris

• Fate contracts of different versions can now call each other (Fate1 can call Fate2 and vice-versa)

• Opcode availability and behaviour now depends on VM version of the contract (Fate2 opcodes are available both when Fate2 contract is called directly and when called by another (possibly Fate1) contract)

• Generalized accounts, allow access to the signed transaction within the authentication context:

switch(Auth.tx)
  Spend(from, to, amount, payload) => ...
  AENSTransfer(from, to, name) => ...
  ...

This enables more use-cases, for example in combination with PayingForTx.

• Added more crypto primitives (mainly pairing operations) for BLS12-381. This enables for example Zero-knowledge proofs and more multi-signature schemes.

• Added functions related to strings. It introduces to_list and from_list primitives that enables flexible string manipulation. Strings.aes standard library functions include many useful string functions.

• Added the possibility to query a an oracle by name hash. A name pointer can map oracle_pubkey to a an oracle to enable query by name hash.

• Added a new transaction to the protocol. PayingForTx allows an account to pay for a transaction on behalf of someone else. This means paying for fees and gas cost, but it will not cover the amount spent by the transaction just the "the cost of the transaction" (and the extra size added by wrapping the original transaction).

• Fixed a bug in the contract store garbage collector causing maps to be more expensive than they should be.

• Added support for protected contract calls. Making a contract call with the named argument protected set to true wraps the result of the call in an option type, returning Some(res) if the call succeeds with result res and None if the call fails for any reason. If the call fails, any side-effects it performed are rolled back.

• AENS pointers are now limited, this is enforced when updating a name:

  • No duplicate pointer keys.

  • Pointer keys are not longer than 256 bytes.

  • A name can not have more than 32 pointers. When a name is updated, or looked up, inside a Sophia contract keys that are no longer valid are automatically removed.

• Added support for CREATE opcode

• Added support for CLONE opcode

• Added support for CLONE_G opcode

• Added support for BYTECODE_HASH opcode

• Included full FATE 2 code with init in state trees. This also applies to off-chain contracts in state channels

• Changed comparison and MAP_TO_LIST FATE opcodes to follow ordering as defined in aebytecode

• Added a new FEE opcode that returns call transaction fee

• Fixed STR_REVERSE to reverse on unicode codepoints instead of raw bytes

• Deprecated Ubuntu 16.04 support. EOL Apr 2021.

• Introduced a new HTTP API for asking the node to provide a correct paying_for_tx. It is marked as debug and it is intended to be used while developing tools that produce that transaction. This API must not be used in real-life scenarios. Since the inner transaction has a specific network_id, a proper check has been added to the API so attempts to create an erroneous paying_for_tx will fail.

• Revisited gas prices and gas charging mechanism. The main change is that gas will, in some cases, be charged earlier - i.e. contracts run out of gas before expensive operations rather than after. This should make the FATE VM more efficient. Gas prices have also been adjusted and new operations have been calibrated.

Please test the iris protocol by activating it in the configuration file as below:

  chain:
    hard_forks:
      "1": 0
      "5": 1

 fork_management:
    network_id: "my_test_iris"

You can also join testnet, the hard fork will happen there at height 425900.

Please let us know if you have any problems by opening a ticket. Troubleshooting of common issues is documented in the wiki.

Documentation

For an overview of the installation process for different platforms, building the package from source, configuration and operation of the Aeternity node please refer to Aeternity node documentation.