Background
The Gaia v20 release is a major release that will follow the standard governance process by initially submitting this post on the Cosmos Hub forum. After collecting forum feedback (~ 1 week) and adapting the proposal as required, a governance proposal will be sent to the Cosmos Hub for voting. The on-chain voting period typically lasts one week.
On governance vote approval, validators will be required to update the Cosmos Hub binary at the halt-height specified in the on-chain proposal.
Release Candidate & Changelog
Proposed Release Contents
This release adds the following major features:
- Permissionless ICS (as per prop 945):
- enables users to permissionlessly launch opt-in Consumer Chains on the Cosmos Hub. Given that validators are free to choose whether they want to run a given opt-in Consumer Chain, it is only natural to also enable projects to launch as opt-in Consumer Chains by simply submitting transactions to the Cosmos Hub and, thus, avoiding the need to go through the process of governance. Note that topN Consumer Chains will still need to go through governance.
- ICS with Inactive Validators (as per prop 930):
- enables validators from outside the Hub’s active set to validate on Consumer Chains. This feature brings the following benefits — it reduces the entry barrier for projects to launch as Consumer Chains since more validators will be allowed to opt in; it enables validators outside the Hub’s active set to compete by providing their services to interesting projects; it reduces the risk of all the validators of a Consumer Chain opting out, which would require the chain to leave ICS.
- Removal of Unbonding Pausing from ICS (as described by ADR 018):
- reduces the complexity of the ICS protocol and removes the dependency between the liveness of undelegation operations on the Cosmos Hub and the liveness of consumer chains.
The release also bumps the following dependencies:
Testing and Testnets
The v20 release has gone through rigorous testing, including e2e tests, and integration tests. In addition, v20 has been independently tested by the team at Hypha Co-op.
Validators and node operators have joined a public testnet to participate in a test upgrade to a release candidate before the Cosmos Hub upgrades to the final release. You can find the relevant information (genesis file, peers, etc.) to join the Release testnet (theta-testnet-001), or the Interchain Security testnet (provider).
Potential risk factors
Although very extensive testing and simulation will have taken place there always exists a risk that the Cosmos Hub might experience problems due to potential bugs or errors from the new features. In the case of serious problems, validators should stop operating the network immediately.
Coordination with validators will happen in the #cosmos-hub-validators-verified channel of the Cosmos Network Discord to create and execute a contingency plan. Likely this will be an emergency release with fixes or the recommendation to consider the upgrade aborted and revert back to the previous release of gaia (v19.2.0).
Governance votes
The following items summarize the voting options and what it means for this proposal:
YES - You agree that the Cosmos Hub should be updated with this release.
NO - You disagree that the Cosmos Hub should be updated with this release.
NO WITH VETO - A ‘NoWithVeto’ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned.
ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to the quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.
100s consumer chains