BNB Beacon Chain Barral Upgrade Announcement

The BNB Beacon Chain is expected to have a scheduled hard fork upgrade at block height 310,182,000. Based on the current block generation speed, the hard fork is forecasted to occur on 21th Apr 2023 at 7:00 (UTC). The full node runners on mainnet must switch their software version to v0.10.10 by 21th Apr.

1. Background Story

1.1 Who is Jean-Augustin Barral?

Jean-Augustin Barral (1819-1884) was a French physician and anatomist known for his contributions to the study of the human body, particularly in the fields of embryology and neurology. He also served as the personal physician to Emperor Napoleon III and was a member of several prestigious scientific institutions in France, as well as a recipient of national honors for his work.

1.2 What is a Hardfork upgrade?

A Hardfork is an upgrade that is incompatible with the previous release because some breaking changes are introduced in the latest release. A hardfork in BNB Beacon Chain requires 2⁄3 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 of 310,182,000. 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, what do I have to do?

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 full node operator, what do I have to do?

This is a hardfork release, and you need to switch to v0.10.10. 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 v0.10.10 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.
3. Stop the bnbchaind process and restart it with v0.10.10.

ulimit -n 65535

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 release page to fix the upgrade issue
2. Backup your home directory

Since the height of the upgrade is set to be 310,182,000, you can run the following command to recover the state to just one block before the upgrade, which is 310,181,999:

1. Restart with the version v0.9.0 of bnbchaind

3. Upcoming Changes

3.1 What will change with the blockchain feature?

BEP171 introduces several security enhancements for the cross-chain bridge between BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain.

To further eliminate the pervasive effects of potential issues in cross chain module, it proposes the following enhancements:

• Upgrade IAVL proof verification to ICS23 spec.
• Apply timer lock to massive funds cross-chain transfer.
• Cross chain channels can be automatically paused by forged proof detection.
• Cross chain channels can be paused by any validator in an emergency.

3.2 What will be different for users?

There will be no difference for users of BC.

Thanks for your cooperation, and let’s make BNB Beacon Chain a modern and secure infrastructure for the BNB ecosystem.

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