Release: Spica Patch 3 - v1.8.11

Why did we postpone the activation of relayed v3?

Just 24 hours before the planned Mainnet activation, an edge case was reported by the VeroPay Founder, Ovidiu Popica. Specifically, if the relayer was the same as the receiver and the transaction type was an ESDTTransfer, the gas consumption could become suboptimal over the long run.

Our team immediately investigated and confirmed the bug. Within 10 hours, we reached out to the validators community and invited everyone to diligently check the new client release changes and manage their nodes accordingly. This fix has now been thoroughly tested and verified—dozens of new tests were added to cover edge cases like this to ensure robust functionality moving forward.

We truly appreciate the responsiveness and readiness of the MultiversX validators. The power of our network lies in its ability to work and coordinate together, and this small hop across the river reinforces how important network-level collaboration is.

Setting Future Incentives

We extend our gratitude to everyone who helped test this feature on Testnet and Devnet before the update. Finding bugs and fixing them early is significantly cheaper, and your efforts help us identify issues before they hit production.

To encourage even broader participation, we plan to create a prize pool for testers on Testnet/Devnet. Prizes will be awarded to those who uncover severe bugs or vulnerabilities, further strengthening our network’s security. More information will follow.

Governance Vote

The Spica v1.8 Release has successfully passed its governance vote. The vote, which ran from August 8th to August 18th, resulted in a decisive 98.65% voting in favor of the upgrade, with 1.10% against and 0.25% abstaining. The entire discourse surrounding the release took place off-chain on Agora, and can be reviewed here.

Documentation

https://docs.multiversx.com/developers/relayed-transactions/#relayed-transactions-version-3

Activation epoch

Spica Patch 3 Release is scheduled to be activated starting with epoch 1671, anticipated on February 25th, 2025, around 16:30 UTC.

‍

Github Full binary release notes: https://github.com/multiversx/mx-chain-go/releases/tag/v1.8.11

Mainnet Config: https://github.com/multiversx/mx-chain-mainnet-config/releases/tag/v1.8.11.1

‍