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Node Releases

Updates to the Nano protocol are done through major node releases, occurring approximately every 1 to 4 months, and necessary patch releases in between. As changes are made to the protocol over time, newer node versions will stop peering with older versions. Details on which versions are actively peering, supported and being developed are included below.

Current Release

The following release is the latest and only release actively supported by the Nano Foundation. This release and the Active Releases below represent the only node versions that will participate on the main network.

Node Version Protocol Version Release Date Release Notes GitHub Links
20.0 17 2019-11-12 V20.0 Release - Milestone - Changelog

Builds and Commands

Known Issue: Peers stake reporting inaccurate (Windows only)

  • Issue: For Windows builds only, when calling confirmation_quorum RPC the peers_stake_total amount returned may be inaccurate, returning a range from the correct full peer stake amount down to 0.

  • Solution: A solution to the issue has been found and as this is a reporting issue only, the fix will be included in the next released version. For those manually building the node, patching the fix pull request onto the V20.0 tag can resolve the issue now. Or alternatively, building on the V20.0 tag with RelWithDebInfo option, see Build Instructions for Windows.

Known Issue: macOS 'Too many open files'

  • Issue: The following error can be seen when attempting to run a full node on macOS using the built-in Qt wallet or other GUI-based wallets: "Exception while running wallet: open: Too many open files". This is due to macOS having a very low default file descriptor limit and V19.0 uses more of them after the move to TCP.

  • Solution: For now a workaround is needed to increase the limit. The method depends on the specific macOS version, but some people had success with the recipe in https://superuser.com/a/1171028.

OS Download link/command
Linux https://repo.nano.org/live/binaries/nano-node-V20.0-Linux.tar.bz2
macOS https://repo.nano.org/live/binaries/nano-node-V20.0-Darwin.dmg
Windows https://repo.nano.org/live/binaries/nano-node-V20.0-win64.exe
Docker docker pull nanocurrency/nano:V20.0 or docker pull nanocurrency/nano:latest
See Pulling the Docker Image for more details.
RHEL/CentOS rpm sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://repo.nano.org/nanocurrency.repo
sudo yum install nanocurrency
This installs nano_node to bin.

Next Planned Release

The following release is currently under development. Details about potential features to be included can be found on the Upcoming Features page.

Node Version Protocol Version Release Date Release Notes GitHub Links
21.0 TBD TBD TBD Release - Milestone - Changelog

Active Releases

The following releases can still actively participate on the network by peering with other nodes of the same versions. Any nodes running versions earlier than these will no longer peer with the latest and fall out of sync with the network.

Node Version Protocol Version Release Date Release Notes GitHub Links
20.0 17 2019-11-12 V20.0 Release - Milestone - Changelog
19.0 17 2019-07-11 V19.0 Release - Milestone - Changelog
18.0 16 2019-02-21 Release - Milestone - Changelog
Known Issue: macOS 'Too many open files'

  • Issue: The following error can be seen when attempting to run a full node on macOS using the built-in Qt wallet or other GUI-based wallets: "Exception while running wallet: open: Too many open files". This is due to macOS having a very low default file descriptor limit and V19.0 uses more of them after the move to TCP.

  • Solution: For now a workaround is needed to increase the limit. The method depends on the specific macOS version, but some people had success with the recipe in https://superuser.com/a/1171028.

Inactive Releases

The following versions are no longer peered with by nodes running the active versions above and will not work properly communicate if run on the network. The details below are for historical purposes only.

Inactive Releases
Node Version Protocol Version Release Date Release Notes GitHub Links
17.1 15 2018-12-21 Release - Milestone - Changelog
17.0 15 2018-12-18 Release - Milestone - Changelog
16.3 14 2018-11-20 Release - Milestone - Changelog
16.2 14 2018-10-11 Release - Milestone - Changelog
16.1 14 2018-09-29 Release - Milestone - Changelog
16.0 14 2018-09-11 Release - Milestone - Changelog
15.2 13 2018-08-22 Release - Milestone - Changelog
15.1 13 2018-08-20 Release - Milestone - Changelog
15.0 13 2018-08-20 Release - Milestone - Changelog
14.2 11 2018-06-21 Release - Changelog
14.1 10 2018-06-11 Release - Changelog
14.0 10 2018-06-11 Release - Changelog
13.0 9 2018-05-10 Release - Changelog
12.1 8 2018-04-21 Release - Changelog
12.0 8 2018-04-18 Release - Changelog
11.2 7 2018-04-04 Release - Changelog
11.1 7 2018-03-29 Release - Changelog
11.0 7 2018-03-23 Release - Changelog
10.0 6 2018-02-15 Release - Changelog
All Previous

Release Notes

V20.0

Nano Forum available

The Nano Forum is available at https://forum.nano.org/ as a resource to ask questions and get support when participating on the network. The Node and Representative Management category is a great place to ask node upgrade related questions.

Upgrade Notices

Only node V18.0 and higher supported

With V20.0 only nodes V18.0 and higher will be peered with on the network (see Active Releases above). This means any nodes running versions earlier than 18.0 will begin to lose peers and fall out of sync over time once upgrades to V20.0 begin.

If you are running a node version earlier than V18.0, please update as soon as possible to avoid disruption.

Database upgrades

Upgrade requires downtime, read carefully

Please review the following details carefully as the automatic database upgrade process will cause downtime for the node.

This version brings some new optimizations to the ledger which require database upgrades to be performed. Due to the nature of upgrades, the following impacts will occur:

  • Upgrade times depend on specs of the node host but are expected to be between 5 and 15 minutes for most cases.
  • Upgrade activities are synchronous which means the node will not be participating on the network and RPC requests won’t be available during the upgrade process - services requiring uptime should plan to swap out their ledger for one upgraded by a separate node or download from a trusted source.
  • Ledger size will grow by up to 50% during this process - please ensure you have free disk space of 3x the current ledger before starting the upgrade (currently ~16GB on the main network).
  • A database vacuum will be automatically performed after the upgrade to reclaim disk space, which can be verified complete in the logs.
  • Doing proper ledger backups is recommended before starting this process. Ensure you have enough disk space to allow for any ledger backups plus the additional disk space required for the database upgrade mentioned above. A new config option in V20, node.backup_before_upgrade, will allow for automated ledger backups between future versions.

New .toml config files
A new setup in V20.0 uses internal default config values, so config files are only needed for non-default settings. During upgrade new .toml format files will be created for the config.json and rpc_config.json files if they contain non-default values. Before migration config_backup_toml_migration.json and rpc_config_backup_toml_migration.json files will be created for backup.

The following commands can be used to generated commented out, complete config files for review:

Only set non-default values in .toml files

It is not recommended to uncomment all values in the .toml file output from commands below. Instead, only uncomment or insert non-default values to ensure any default value changes in future release are only overridden when needed.

Name Description Generated with
config-node.toml Node configuration nano_node --generate_config node
config-rpc.toml RPC configuration nano_node --generate_config rpc
config-nano-pow-server.toml Proof of work server configuration nano_pow_server --generate_config
config-qtwallet.toml Qt developer wallet configuration This file is maintained by the Qt wallet

More details on the new configuration setup can be found in the node Configuration documentation.

Networking changes
Improvements to default network setup in this version requires less setup from node operators, specifically around port forwarding. Although new setups will immediately benefit, any existing systems that have already setup port forwarding may be impacted by these changes. For those systems, we recommend validating your network setup allows proper peering with a test V20.0 node prior to upgrading. If you run into issues, review the Troubleshooting UPnP documentation for assistance. Additional help can be sought in the Node and Representative Management forum category.

Proof-of-Work management
A couple changes to PoW management that services should be aware of:

  • With OpenCL enabled, nodes will still use the local CPU for work generation by default. Setting node.work_threads to 0 will turn this off if required.
  • Regenerating PoW for delayed transactions during high network load will now happen by default through the process RPC. If you wish to turn this off, setting watch_work to false is required.

Other updates to review
Improvements to the External Management and Block Confirmation and Tracking documentation should help clarify the recommended approaches to building integrations.

Major Updates

Migration to .toml config files
Better legibility, support for comments, and no more having the node write to your config files are some of the benefits of this upgrade. Any non-default values captured in your existing .json files will be migrated and you can export a full list of configuration options for use with simple commands. See additional callouts in Upgrade Notices above and in the node Configuration documentation.

Proof-of-Work regeneration outside development wallet
Any requests to the process RPC will have the new watch_work option turned on by default, allowing the node to regenerate Proof-of-Work for blocks even if they are outside of the node’s development wallet. This makes Dynamic PoW and prioritization function more consistently across the network. If you have an external integration utilizing this RPC call, you will automatically start taking advantage of rework during confirmation delays on the network.

RocksDB experimental support
With better disk IO usage, RocksDB is being introduced in this version with experimental support. It is not recommended for use in production, but those interested in testing out a more performant database for the ledger should checkout how to install RocksDB and try it out on development and test systems. We also have a related discussion in our forum for those interested.

Active elections and other optimizations
Thanks to our excellent community testers putting effort into collecting and analyzing block, voting and confirmation data from the beta network, we’ve found various optimizations with the active elections process, confirmation request attempts and bootstrapping behaviors. Various changes have been implemented to help reduce resource usage on nodes in various areas and increase the available throughput on the network. This feature also enhances the effectiveness of prioritization and rework of PoW. No action is needed to take advantage of these great updates.

Infrastructure for PoW transition
Back in September we announced a new PoW algorithm design we had been working on which aimed to be memory hard. After open sourcing an implementation of the algorithm, an efficient low-memory solution was found and we subsequently removed the algorithm implementation from V20.

As part of the original implementation work we were able to setup infrastructure for moving PoW out of the node process in the future, and also added support for version 2 of epoch blocks, which will allow the network upgrade later when a new PoW algorithm is ready. These updates will be included in Lydia but not be utilized until a future version. To follow along with node releases going forward, check out the Upcoming Features page.

RPC Updates

  • BEHAVIOR CHANGE process now takes an optional flag watch_work (default true). Unless set to false, processed blocks can be subject to PoW rework
  • BEHAVIOR CHANGE bootstrap, bootstrap_any and boostrap_lazy will now throw errors when certain launch flags are used to disabled bootstrap methods - see each RPC page for details
  • BEHAVIOR CHANGE RPCs requiring work generation will now throw errors when work generation is disabled (no work peers, no OpenCL and no work threads configured)
  • block_count no longer requires config option enable_control to get the cemented block count
  • unchecked now takes an optional flag json_block to return blocks in JSON-format
  • version now includes more fields - network label, identifier (hash of the genesis open block) and build information
  • peers and node_id now return node IDs with a node_ prefix
  • work_generate and work_validate can now take a multiplier (against base difficulty) to set a different difficulty threshold

CLI Updates

  • NEW generate_config [node|rpc] prints sample configuration files to stdout
    • use_defaults additional argument to generate uncommented entries (not recommended)
  • NEW config passes configuration arguments, alternative to setting in the config file

Node Configuration Updates

Support in Nano Forum

For node operators looking to upgrade to V20.0 or tune their configurations, the Node and Representative Management category of the forum is a great resource to use.

Generate .toml config to see options

As noted in the Upgrade Notices above, this version will migrate your existing .json files over to .toml files. Only non-default values for these fields will be added to the new .toml file. If you wish to adjust other options, use the config generation commands to see all available options.

The following options are notable node configuration updates. Additional configuration changes have been included in this release and can be found when generating the config files.

  • backup_before_upgrade (default false) enables automatic backup of the ledger and wallet databases when updating to a new node version
  • work_watcher_period (default 5 seconds) controls how frequently the node should check the confirmation status of block in the work watcher, and re-generate higher difficulty work if unconfirmed
  • max_work_generate_multiplier (default 64.0) previously max_work_generate_difficulty, now a multiplier for easier management, specifies the absolute maximum difficulty multiplier to be used for work generation

Developer/Debug Options

  • New RPC epoch_upgrade allowing easier epoch distribution (Note - this epoch requires a special private key to be used, see the Network Upgrades page for information)
  • RPC bootstrap has a new optional "bypass_frontier_confirmation"
  • RPC bootstrap_status now displays more data about the current bootstrap attempt
  • New CLI debug_stacktrace displays an example stacktrace, simulating an unexpected program crash
  • New CLI debug_account_versions displays the total number of accounts separated by version and opened/unopened
  • CLI debug_validate_blocks updated to cover more cases
  • CLI debug_profile_verify renamed to debug_profile_validate and now provides simplified work validation profiling
  • New CMake build options:
  • NANO_ROCKSDB enables use of the RocksDB database backend, experimental
  • NANO_WARN_TO_ERR turns compiler warnings into errors on Linux/Mac
  • NANO_TIMED_LOCKS provides information on mutexes held for a long time
  • NANO_STACKTRACE_BACKTRACE uses libbacktrace to provide stacktraces
  • CI_BUILD if set, uses the TRAVIS_TAG environment variable to modify the locally reported node version, to help with support tickets

Deprecations

The following functionality is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release:

  • Addresses containing a dash (ex. nano- or xrb-) are being deprecated and will not longer be compatible with the node in a future release. Addresses using underscores will only be supported.

V19.0

Upgrade Notices

Version Limits
Upgrades from versions V17.1 and to V19 will involve a sequential database upgrade and impact participation of the node on the network. RPC calls will be unavailable for a long period of time amongst other impacts.

Upgrading from V17.1 and earlier to V19.0 not recommended

It is highly recommended that nodes are upgraded to V18.0 first or a V18.0 ledger is acquired and used when upgrading to V19.0.

Confirmation tracking considerations
The addition of confirmation height to the database requires the node to validate that blocks are confirmed before the cementing can occur. This process can take up to 24 hours or longer to complete and will cause an increase in some resource usage, particularly CPU and network bandwidth increases, but won’t impact participation on the network. For integrations watching confirmations, the existing HTTP callback, block_confirm RPC and confirmation_history RPC methods will continue to function as before.

Tracking confirmed block hashes required

It is required that tracking of confirmed block hashes outside the node is done to avoid potential duplicate notifications from causing issues. This was a requirement in previous versions and remains the same with V19.

For those looking to utilize the new WebSocket confirmation subscription or new confirmed field in block_info RPC responses, special considerations should be taken if implementing before confirmation height updates are complete:

  • If the websocket confirmation subscription is hooked up to receive all confirmations (default) then notifications for confirmations will come through during the cementing process on a new or upgrading ledger as the confirmation process will occur (it also fires for dependent confirmations)
  • Calls to block_info for blocks in the ledger before the confirmation height upgrade process began may indicate confirmed as false despite their having been confirmed on the network before. This is expected behavior.
  • To validate that confirmation height upgrade is complete, note the count value from the block_count RPC when the upgrade is started and once the cemented amount returned by this call (include the include_cemented option) is higher than that previous count, cementing is in sync.

Emitting nano_ prefixed addresses
In this and future versions, all addresses emitted from the node will use the nano_ prefix. It will continue to support input for xrb_ prefixed addresses, but all services must verify they are properly set up to handle the node outputting nano_ prefixed addresses.

Live network over TCP
Live network traffic over TCP is now available and operates on the same port (7075 for main network, 54000 for beta network) as the bootstrapping network that was already available over TCP. Because of this, existing network setups that are open inbound and outbound on port 7075 for TCP should function as expected with V19.0. For those running production services, it is still recommended to verify network ports setup and consider setting up a new node on internal networks to ensure it can connect and participate on the main network before production nodes are upgraded.

  • To check for proper connection via TCP, call the peers RPC with peer_details option and look for peers with type = tcp. This command can be used to search for these instances:
curl -sd '{"action": "peers", "peer_details":"true"}' [::1]:7076 | grep "\"type\": \"tcp\"" | wc -l

Major Updates

Confirmation Height
This provides cementing of blocks by marking on an account the highest block height that has been confirmed for the account. A more detailed look at this feature can be found in the relatd Medium article: https://medium.com/nanocurrency/looking-up-to-confirmation-height-69f0cd2a85bc

TCP Network
Blocks being published and voted on live are now supported via TCP, with UDP remaining as a fallback. See the TCP callouts in Upgrade Notices above for information about verifying your network setup is ready for the upgrade.

Dynamic Proof-of-Work and Prioritization
With the ability to track work difficulty seen on the network and have the node wallet produce more difficult work for local blocks, this feature allows users to get their transactions prioritized for processing. More details about this feature can be found in the Medium article: https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-prioritization-4618b78c5be9

RPC Process Options
By default the RPC server will run in the node process, but can be configured to run as a child process or completely out of process (currently limited to running on the same computer), depending on your needs. See Running Nano as a service for more details.

RPC/CLI Updates

No Breaking Changes

There were no breaking changes made in V19 for any RPC or CLI commands. It is recommended any integrations run tests against V19 before upgrading production nodes, and also explore the various changes below to improve their setups.

  • NEW unopened RPC provides the total pending balance for unopened accounts
  • NEW active_difficulty RPC allows tracking of the difficulty levels seen on the network which can be used to target higher levels of PoW to prioritize transactions
  • Using --diagnostics CLI option now validates config and generates default one if it doesn’t exist
  • wallet_create and wallet_change_seed RPCs accept seed and return restored accounts for easier seed management
  • The pending RPC can now optionally be using sorting by amount
  • Difficulty and multiplier options available in work_generate and work_validate RPCs for easier management of dynamic work levels on blocks
  • State blocks returned by block_info/blocks_info contain subtype for easier identification of block types
  • Json literals supported for block input (process, sign, and block_hash) and output (block_create, block_info, blocks_info, confirmation_info, unchecked_get and unchecked_keys) on RPC calls
  • A new optional argument include_not_found in blocks_info allows requests which contain invalid block hashes to get results that include an array of blocks_not_found instead of just an error
  • The account_history RPC now:
    • Accepts account_filter to allow filtering of results to a specific account or set of accounts
    • Allows reverse option to return details starting from the head block on the account
    • Block height on account chain now included in response
  • The accounts_pending RPC allows for sorting by amounts
  • For ledger and unopened RPCs a new optional threshold value can be used to limit results by balance
  • A new include_cemented option in block_count RPC adds return of the cemented blocks in the ledger - cemented blocks are ones that have been confirmed and are at or below the confirmation height set on the account

Node Configuration Updates

Config.json

  • New active_elections_size will limit the number of active elections allowed before dropping occurs. Default is 50,000 but higher settings are recommended for nodes provisioned with 8GB RAM or more
  • New bandwidth_limit will limit the outbound voting traffic to 5MB/s by default
  • New confirmation_history_size provides an adjustable limit on the batching of confirmations return in the confirmation_history RPC. Default 2048 which will support up to ~56 confirmations/sec before confirmations may be missed. The new websocket setup with confirmation subscription is recommended over use of the confirmation_history RPC.

Advanced Configuration

New vote_generator_delay allows for tuning performance of bundling votes by hash before sending.

Rpc_config.json
This new file was split out from the config.json file as the RPC server can now be run in its own process. Entries previously existing in config.json were migrated over and new values added. One setting to note: the max_request_size parameter is defaulted to 32MB - if your service is submitting data amounts larger than this you will need to adjust accordingly.

Automated config backups
Backups of config files will be made prior to upgrades. During upgrades from V18 to V19 you will see a backup created even for the new rpc_config.json - this is expected behavior given the upgrade process.

Developer/Debug Options

Deprecations

The following RPC calls are being deprecated and will be removed in a future release:

Other Notices

New nanorep QR code standard
A new nanorep QR code standard for easier management of representative changes was added for wallets and other services to consider supporting.

New recommended block explorer
The Nano Foundation supports a new recommended block explorer - NanoCrawler. We encourage services and exchanges linking out to block explorers to consider using NanoCrawler going forward as it provides solid design and performance for referencing blocks, accounts and more.