Release: Barnard - v1.10.4

Barnard is ready for upgrade

Following Andromeda's improvement of block-finality time, Barnard delivers the second critical upgrade in the journey toward 600ms block times for Supernova. This release introduces protocol-level self-governance, streamlines developer tooling, tightens fee economics, and improves infrastructure across the board.

Any wallet can now initiate a proposal by bonding 500 EGLD for the duration of the vote. If the proposal is vetoed, part of the bond is forfeited; otherwise, it's returned in full. Voting happens through standard transactions containing vote data (yes, no, abstain, veto), with voting power determined by a user's staked EGLD and liquid staking positions.

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Web Wallet, xPortal, and governance.multiversx.com will fully support proposal creation and voting. Proposals pass if quorum is met, YES votes outweigh NOs, the YES ratio exceeds the pass threshold, and VETO remains below its fail threshold. After activation, the governance contract will also manage stale votes, closed proposals, and allow proposers to cancel drafts before voting begins.

Barnard also introduces a more efficient way to handle account storage with a new /address/iterate-keys endpoint, making it easier for apps to stream large account states without hitting timeouts.

On the economic front, the “max higher gas factor” is reduced from 10× to 2×, discouraging gas abuse and ensuring honest users don’t overbid for block space.

To support the upcoming 600ms block times and sub-second rounds, Barnard brings finer time granularity to smart contracts by transitioning from second-based to millisecond-based timestamps. In parallel, the release upgrades to the Go 1.23 toolchain, improves build pipelines, enhances VM hook capabilities, simulates heartbeats more accurately, and simplifies node activation procedures.

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Governance Vote Results

The Barnard v1.10 Release has successfully passed its governance vote. The vote, which ran from June 11th to June 21st, resulted in a decisive 98.27% voting in favor of the upgrade, with 1.41% against and 0.32% abstaining. The entire discourse surrounding the release took place off-chain on Agora, and can be reviewed here.

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Activation epoch

Barnard Release is scheduled to be activated starting with epoch 1820, anticipated on July 24th, 2025, around 17:00 UTC.

Same epoch, the old Governance module will become inactive for 11 epochs with the new module becoming usable at epoch 1831 on August 4th, ~17:00 UTC.

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Github Full binary release notes: https://github.com/multiversx/mx-chain-go/releases/tag/v1.10.4

Mainnet Config: https://github.com/multiversx/mx-chain-mainnet-config/releases/tag/v1.10.4.1

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Barnard v1.10.4 is already live on public testnet and devnet for validators, builders, and users.

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