BNB Beacon Chain Mainnet Descartes Upgrade

The BNB Beacon Chain mainnet is expected to have a scheduled hard fork upgrade at a block height of 234,560,000. Based on the current block generation speed, the hard fork is forecasted to occur on April 12, 2022, at 06:00 AM (UTC). The full-node operators on the mainnet must switch their software version to v0.9.0 by April 12, 2022.

1. Background Story

1.1 Who is René Descartes?

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 a block height of 234,560,000. 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

If you are using any exchanges which support BNB Chain (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. Please ensure that you complete the switch before the hardfork block height.

Upgrade instructions

1. If your node is already synced with the network, please download the new v0.9.0 binary and replace the previous version. 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 node-binary repo for fixing the upgrade issue.
2. Back up your home directory.
   
   Since the height of the upgrade is set to be 234,560,000, you can run the following command to recover the state to just one block before the upgrade, which is 234,559,999:
   ./state_recover 234559999 <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?

Following BEP-128 will improve BNB Smart Chain staking reward distribution.

• Reduce the load on the breath block by distributing only validators' commission fees in it while storing all delegator's rewards in 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 the users?

• The impact on 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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