BNB Beacon Chain Testnet Descartes Upgrade

The BNB Beacon Chain testnet is expected to have a scheduled hard fork upgrade at block height 23,551,600. Based on the current block generation speed, the hard fork is forecasted to occur on March 15, 2022, at 06:00 AM (UTC). The full node runners on testnet must switch their software version to v0.9.0 by March 15, 2022.

1. Background Story

1.1 Who is René Descarte?

This upgrade is named after René Descartes in honor of his key contributions to philosophy and mathematics. He was a French philosopher widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy and algebraic geometry.

1.2 What is a Hardfork upgrade?

A Hardfork is an upgrade that is not compatible with the previous release because some breaking changes are introduced in the latest release. A hardfork in BNB Beacon Chain requires more than ⅔ of validators to upgrade to make blocks successfully. If the existing full nodes in the network do not upgrade, they will not receive and execute further blocks after the hardfork block height.

1.3 What happens during a network upgrade?

New rules and logic changes will occur for this upgrade at block height 23,551,600. After the upgrade kicks in, the blockchain can handle a series of new business rules and logic.

2. How does this upgrade affect me?

2.1 As a BNB holder

If you are using any exchanges which support BNB (such as Binance.com, BitMax, or Gate.io), one of the wallets, or a hardware wallet (such as Ledger, Cool Wallet), there's no action required on your side unless your exchange or wallet service notifies you.

2.2 As a BNB Beacon Chain DEX user

There are no changes to the BNB Beacon Chain DEX matching engine logic. No action is required on your end.

2.3 As a full node operator

This is a hardfork release, and you need to switch to v0.9.0. Upgrade instructions are as below  (you should do all the below before the hardfork block height):

1. If your node is already synced with the network, please download the new v0.9.0 binary and replace the previous version, and download the new config file app.toml to replace the previous version.
2. Increase the open file limit to 65535
   ulimit -n 65535

3. Stop the bnbchaind process and restart it with v0.9.0.
bnbchaind start --home <home-path>

2.4 What will happen if I forget to upgrade my full node in time?

If you fail to upgrade your software on time, your node will not sync with the upgraded BNB Beacon Chain peer/validator nodes. You will not be able to connect or send transactions.

How to recover?
You can find detailed info at doc-site.

1. Download the tool state-recover from the node-binary repo for fixing the upgrade issue
2. Backup your home directory

Since the height of the upgrade is set to be 23,551,600, you can run the following command to recover the state to just one block before the upgrade, which is 23,551,599:
./state_recover 23551599 <your_home_path>

3. Restart with the version v0.9.0 of bnbchaind
bnbchaind start --home <home-path>

3. Upcoming Changes

3.1 What will change with the blockchain feature?

Follow BEP-128 to improve BNB Smart Chain Staking Reward Distribution.

• Reduce the load on breath block by distributing only validators' commission fee in it while storing all delegator's rewards to a separate store.
• Guarantee timely reward distribution by adjusting an appropriate batch size to ensure the process can be finished quickly.

3.2 What will change for users?

• The impact to general delegators is that their rewards will be delayed a bit after applying this proposal. However, the delay is relatively small and can be ignored compared to the whole staking process.

Thanks for your cooperation, and let's make BNB Beacon Chain a modern and secure infrastructure for issuing and exchanging digital assets.

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