Oxen Hardfork (9.0.0 Audacious Aurochs)

Oxen is announcing its next major hardfork today. Oxen 9.1.0 Audacious Aurochs is tentatively scheduled to release on the 22nd of April with a hardfork a week later, on the 29th of April. 

Here are some of the new features and improvements which will be included included in the 9.1.0 hardfork: 

• Blockchain support for ONS Wallet Registration (Allows a user to send Oxen to a name) Note that support for sending to ONS wallet addresses in wallets will come later.

• Removal of PoW requirement on Oxen storage server

• Decommission/Deregistration reason reporting: the blockchain will now include a record indicating why a Service Node was decommissioned

• Better storage server reporting to allow easier storage server problem diagnostics

• Time synchronisation testing to make sure a Service Node’s clock is not significantly off

• New extendable uptime proof format that now includes lokinet/storage server version info

• More robust onion requests protocol

• Increase storage server maximum message storage time to 14 days

• Oxen core fee reduction for transactions and ONS registrations

• “Liblokinet” support allowing us to start embedding Lokinet into applications without requiring a lokinet installation

• Tons of smaller fixes and improvements we’ve added over the past months

All of these changes will go live at the time of the hardfork, the proposed timeline is indicated at the bottom of this article. 

Oxen devs are making sure everything is ready to go for widespread deployment by testing the blockchain, storage server, and Lokinet releases on testnet. We’re currently testing on dozens of testnet nodes plus a small number of mainnet nodes; our plan is to continue testing through this week and, assuming things go smoothly, expect we can have the final, 9.1.0 release out on the 22nd. 

Up until that release, it’s likely we will continue to make various small updates and fixes, so make sure to keep up to date with the latest on the dev branches of the respective GitHub projects (storage-server, oxen-core, and loki-network) if you’re running your own dev builds for testing. Just a reminder, in case you see Oxen 9.0.0 nodes reported on the network that this is our pre-release version being tested: the final release will be numbered 9.1.0.

If the testing goes well and no major complications are found, then we will tag and release precompiled versions of the final binaries on Thursday the 22nd of April. This will make the beginning of the mandatory upgrade period. One week later, on the 29th of April, the mandatory upgrade period will end and the hardfork will occur. 

This timeline is subject to change depending on the results of the testing period next week, where we test the 9.0.0 tag (or any subsequent changes reflected on the dev branch) on the public testnet.