Nano has announced a new major update of the Nano node – the Dolphin

The update brings stability improvements, new features, and rebranding of old code directories

The upgrade process is automatic and requires large amounts of CPU power

On January 24, 2019, Nano team has announced a new major update of the Nano node called Dolphin V18. Even though the release will mostly focus on stability and performance of the node, bringing small tweaks and optimizations, a number of new features will be present as well. According to the post in their blog, the first release candidate is “coming out soon”.

What’s New?

The update brings a sizeable list of changes:

The node will hold a cache of representatives to reference their weights for faster voting on all accounts across a wallet, as opposed to getting representative weights for each account individually. This provides performance improvements, especially for services with heavy wallet usage.

Additional local data will be supported: this will be achieved by adding new columns and denormalizing parts of the data structure

New config option has been added to allow peering of local nodes

Confirming any active transactions that are dependent on an existing confirmed transaction

Option to disable automatic wallet backups has been introduced

It is possible to find the full list of upgrades and track the development of Dolphin here. Ledgers using older versions of Nano node software will be incompatible with ledgers using Dolphin software because of the database upgrade.

Continuing the Rebranding Process

Nano team continues to get rid of any RaiBlocks naming left after the project officially got its new name back in January 2018. The latest steps in this direction can be seen in Dolphin code: every piece of its code containing RaiBlocks branding has been renamed. The biggest areas of code retitled are data directories RaiBlocks, RaiBlocksBeta, or RaiBlocksTest, which are now called Nano, NanoBeta, or NanoTest respectively.

How to Upgrade

Nano team strongly recommends performing a backup of all the node data before starting the upgrade process.

The process itself is automated and is executed in the background. Because of that, it uses a lot of CPU power. During the upgrade, the database is being updated and all block entries in that process, desktop wallets included, are being rewritten.

The upgrade allows for sync of blocks across the network to be performed but syncing will consume more than the usual amount of system resources.

The team also encourages those upgrading to test out external scripts on the beta net before using them in production. For more information, join Nano’s Discord beta-net channel.