v0.16 Migration Report — Week 3

Dash Core v0.16.0.1 was released on Wednesday, September 30th, the first release of v0.16.x.

Please see the updated product brief to learn about the main improvements in v0.16 or the Release Notes for the detailed set of changes.

Friday October 23th marks just over three weeks since the release of v0.16.0.1.

Note: v16 is a mandatory upgrade for everyone: miners, masternodes and users! Once the hard fork activates and the diverging block is mined, outdated clients will no longer follow the main chain.

Masternode Upgrade Progress

At this point, about 75% of all masternodes have been upgraded to v0.16.0.1. This has increased by 9% in the last week. Thanks to all the MNOs for taking the time to upgrade promptly.

We’ll very likely reach 80% by the end of this next week.

Miner Upgrade Progress

Version 0.16 includes a BIP9 activated hard fork. The activation works in periods or “windows” of 4032 blocks. The third window opened at block 1358784, and was mined on 2020–10–22 06:29:59 UTC. This window is roughly ~7.35 days long and would require ~79.2% of the miners to upgrade for the hard fork to “Lock in”. Each subsequent window reduces the threshold slightly, until it reaches 60% in 10 windows. The exact threshold schedule can be found here.

At the time of writing, several pools have already mined blocks signalling support of the upgrade. About 800 blocks into this window, 13% of blocks have signaled for the upgrade.

This is good progress since last week, additionally, a major miner just recently upgraded and has signaled a few blocks. We expect this percentage to significantly increase over the next week.

We encourage all miners to test this new release and begin upgrading your systems to v0.16.0.1.

Spork Activation and old Masternode PoSe banning

In this release, two new sporks have been added, Spork 21 and Spork 22.

Spork 21 enables minimum protocol checks and LLMQ concentrated recovery. Spork 21 will be activated approximately seven days after 80% of the masternodes have upgraded to ensure that all MN operators have sufficient time to upgrade their node(s). Once Spork 21 is activated, non-upgraded nodes will begin to be Proof of Service (PoSe) banned.

I expect that Spork 21 will be activated in about 14 days. An exact date will be announced once 80% of the network has upgraded.

The timeline for Spork 22, which bumps the maximum number of participants in a round of PrivateSend to 20, will be specified in a future post and will likely be activated after the hard fork has activated.