Advance notice: Gaia v27.6 CosmWasm updates

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Gaia v27.6 is now running on the Cosmos Hub public testnet ahead of an upcoming mainnet software upgrade proposal.

The release includes two CosmWasm configuration updates requested by developers:

  • Increase the maximum compiled contract size from 800 KiB to 1.6 MiB.
  • Allow contracts read-only access to governance proposal and validator information through two additional gRPC queries.

Several CosmWasm developers have requested a larger contract limit. The increase gives developers more flexibility to deploy larger optimized contracts without having to split or refactor them solely to remain under the previous limit. The same approximately 1.6 MiB limit is already used by Neutron, while some other CosmWasm chains permit larger contracts.

When CosmWasm was enabled on the Hub, Gaia followed wasmd’s conservative default of allowing only explicitly reviewed, deterministic gRPC queries. The proposal and validator queries were not needed at launch, so they were not included. Developers have since identified clear uses for them, and both are read-only queries that can now be added to the allowlist.

Feedback from CosmWasm developers, validators, and node operators is welcome before the mainnet proposal is submitted.

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Looking forward to these changes landing!

While migrating Hydro from Neutron to the Cosmos Hub, the contract size adjustment is really helping us out a lot - Neutron has already allowed 1.6MiB, and this just makes it easier for any teams moving their contracts over.

The extra queries are also nice, since those will allow building more expressive contracts on the Cosmos Hub, e.g. for Hydro it allows us to directly have our contract interact with the validator info to assign voting power to lockups correctly; on Neutron we used Interchain Queries, now moving to the Cosmos Hub having these queries directly available means we avoid relying on the more complex relaying infrastructure and save latency between things like slashing events changing the share ratio of validator shares and affected voting power on Hydro adjusting.

We’ve already deployed a test contract on the Cosmos Hub testnet, and found no issues; thanks for the great work team, looking forward to the upgrade!

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