We are super excited to announce the next release for Loki, which will contain Bulletproofs, along with a few larger quality of life changes for Service Node staking.

Features include:

Add Bulletproofs;

Lower transaction fees in accordance with Bulletproofs;

Add staking from the GUI wallet;

Governance wallet payout changed from once per block to once per 5,040 blocks, this reduces blockchain bloat;

IPV6 Support for Loki Daemon and Loki wallet CLI;

Zawy difficulty adjustment algorithm patch;

Service Node grace period added, Service Nodes that consecutively register within a time frame at the end of their staking period will not be deregistered;

Fix for the common “No known outputs” bug;

Integration testing framework;

Increased visibility of when locked amounts are being received;

Increased visibility for the unlock time of staking transactions;

Add the SwarmID field to all Service Nodes which provides the framework for the logical grouping of nodes;

Merge Monero upstream, this includes over 1,000 commits that Monero has added over the last three months;

Merge Monero GUI Upstream which fixes a number of bugs in the GUI wallet;

Add versioning to Service Node uptime proofs — nodes reporting old versions past the hardfork will be de-registered.

Below is the schedule for the hardfork, with all changes available for testing on testnet between the 20th and the 30th of November. We encourage everyone to jump onto testnet soon so that the team can find bugs and update binaries before the 30th of November, when the final binaries will be released.

Who needs to update?

Everyone — including users, miners and Service Node operators. Once the hardfork occurs, you will not be able to send Loki unless you update to the new wallet.

Will my Service Node be affected?

Yes, in this hardfork we will be adding an extra field to uptime proofs: each node will report its version number, and nodes exhibiting the incorrect or no version number will be deregistered as a result of quorum testing. To ensure safe operation, you must update your Service Node to version 2.0.0 (Festive Freya) before 13 December 2018.

We have made an instructional video guide on how to safely update a Service Node, here.

Will Autostaking be affected?

Yes, although we are not making any specific changes to autostake, the introduction of bulletproofs makes old wallets incompatible with the protocol upgrades. This means that if you want to autostake, you will need to shutdown any running Loki wallets (listed as loki-wallet-cli) and start a new autostaking wallet that can submit transactions with bulletproofs.