BNB Beacon Chain Testnet Einstein Upgrade Announcement

The BNB Beacon Chain testnet is expected to have a scheduled hard fork upgrade at block height 34,587,202 and 34,963,303. Based on the current block generation speed, the hard fork is forecasted to occur on 2nd Jan 2023. at 3:00 (UTC) and 12 Jan 2023. at 3:00 (UTC). The full node runners on testnet must switch their software version to v0.10.4 by 2nd Jan.

1. Background Story

1.1 Who is Albert Einstein?

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics.

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 34,587,202 and 34,963,303. 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 v0.10.4. 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 v0.10.4 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 v0.10.4.

ulimit -n 65535

bnbchaind start --home <home-path>

2.3 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. Backup your home directory

Since the height of the upgrade is set to be 34,587,202, you can run the following command to recover the state to just one block before the upgrade, which is 34,587,201:

3. Restart with the version v0.9.0 of bnbchaind

3. Upcoming Changes

3.1 What will change with the blockchain feature?

BEP159 introduces a permissionless validator election mechanism and brings the staking economy onto Beacon Chain. Anyone can stake their BNB to become a validator candidate or delegate their BNB to the validator candidates they trust. The validator set will be determined by the rank of the accumulated bonded tokens on validator candidates. The validators will be responsible for producing new blocks, in return, they will get block rewards, and share the rewards with delegators. By implementing this, the BNB holder has superpower to contribute to the security and gain reward. Staking BNB grants the right to vote on proposals and make decisions on the future of the network.

The upgrade get three phases:

• ​​Phase1: Open self delegation for validators, enable new reward distribution and new validator election mechanism. The current validator should delegate enough BNB to ensure it won't be elected out in phase2.
• Phase2: Open validator creation. Anyone can stake enough BNB to become a validator of Beacon Chain.
• Phase3: Open delegation. Anyone can delegate their BNB to a validator and get reward in return.

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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