Update on timing:
v8 (ICA bug fix)
Due to some bugs in third-party modules discovered only once we had done a test upgrade from the current live Cosmos Hub state, we were not able to cut the v8 release on January 9th as we had hoped. Instead, it went out about a week later on January 16th. One learning from this is that we should have a nightly testing setup which attempts to upgrade the state of the current live Cosmos Hub to the current latest code. If we had this, we would have learned of the bugs months ago.
The upgrade will go live on the release testnet on Friday: Big Dipper | Testnet Block Explorer
Once the upgrade succeeds on the release testnet we will put the upgrade proposal on mainnet (probably on Monday or Tuesday).
v9 (replicated security)
We cut a final release of the RS module on Monday of this week. The audit of the RS module started this week, and will run for 2 weeks.
The release of Gaia v9 was delayed by about a week, as we were upgrading everything to IBC 4.2, from IBC 3.4. This is because 3.4 will have an end of life in March. We could have used 3.4, but that would have resulted in needing to release v10 very soon after v9 (which itself will be released very soon after v8), increasing error surface, hassle for validators, and stress on the team. This migration to IBC 4.2 is now done, and the release will be cut very early Monday morning, and go to the persistent RS testnet on Monday during the day. The persistent testnet will run for 2 weeks starting next week. The persistent testnet is there to test some final things specific to RS.
After the RS persistent testnet has tested everything to our satisfaction after 2 weeks (it will continue running after this, hence “persistent”), we will start the release testnet for v9. The upgrade from v8 to v9 in the release testnet will take 3 days, after which the voting period is 2 weeks.
All told, we are currently projecting a go live date of February 22nd for Gaia v9 with replicated security.