Wednesday, May 21, 2025
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Release: Andromeda - v1.9.6

1 · Why Andromeda?

The pre-Andromeda design traded a second “confirmation” block for safety. That safety came at a cost: >12 s finality, leader-centric risks, slower cross-shard flows and heavyweight cross-chain proofs. Andromeda removes those bottlenecks without sacrificing Byzantine-fault tolerance. MultiversX Agora

2 · What changes exactly?

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Area Before After Andromeda Impact
Finality Needs extra confirmation block Block is final once consensus proof exists 3× faster finality
Consensus group 63 / 400 validators sign on execution shards All 400 sign Single-round majority, stronger security, fairer rewards
Equivocation Possible if proposer aggregates conflicting signatures Any node can finalise (Equivalent Consensus Proofs) Zero equivocation, no single-point-of-failure
Cross-shard tx >6 blocks, ~45 s path 3 blocks, 18 s path >2× faster cross-shard execution
Cross-chain proofs Validator subset + shuffle metadata every block Fixed 400-validator set per epoch Proofs smaller, verification simpler

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3 ·  What do builders & dApp teams need to check?

  • Cross-shard assumptions – update any hard-coded 6-block flows to 3-block logic.
  • Proof-verifiers – external bridges/oracles can drop the confirmation-block check and use the new fixed validator-set proofs.
  • Monitoring/analytics – expect half the finality time and a higher signature count per block (400 sigs).

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Governance Vote Results

The Andromeda v1.9 Release has successfully passed its governance vote. The vote, which ran from March 28th to April 7th, resulted in a decisive 99.69% voting in favor of the upgrade, with 0.12% against and 0.19% abstaining. The entire discourse surrounding the release took place off-chain on Agora, and can be reviewed here.

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Activation epoch

Andromeda Release is scheduled to be activated starting with epoch 1763, anticipated on May 28th, 2025, around 17:00 UTC.

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Github Full binary release notes: https://github.com/multiversx/mx-chain-go/releases/tag/v1.9.6

Mainnet Config: https://github.com/multiversx/mx-chain-mainnet-config/releases/tag/v1.9.6.0

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