The EOS public network was successfully upgraded to EOSIO v1.8 on Monday September 23rd! Two hours prior to the planned upgrade time, 21/ 21 top BPs were present on the BP call to give the “GO or NO GO” for upgrade… and everyone agreed, it was GO time! We are happy to report that the 1.8 activation was professionally executed and the network continued to run smoothly without experiencing any downtime. Those who want to relive the historic moment can do so by watching the livestream that was broadcasted on our YouTube channel.

Special thanks to Dafeng Guo from EOS Asia and Yves La Rose from EOS Nation for helping with the coordination and translation efforts across English, Mandarin, Telegram, WeChat and Zoom! Thank you to Daniel Keyes from EOS Nation for hosting weekly 1.8 Upgrade calls from June 25th to September 23rd, and we also want to give a big thanks to EOS Lao Mao who helped with the coordination effort while also coding a upgrade checker that all BPs ran prior to upgrade to validate that their nodes were ready.

The high level of coordination and cooperation demonstrated among the EOS community is something we can all be proud of! Thank you to everyone who participated and contributed throughout this process, there are too many to name all of you! This was a great community effort and a fantastic example of what makes the EOS public network so powerful!

Ok great, 1.8 is activated! Now what? The next steps involve enabling all the different features found within EOSIO v1.8. These features were enabled on testnets months ago and no issues have been found so we expect them to be enabled on the EOS public network in the coming days and weeks. The most anticipated feature for many is “Codename: ONLY_BILL_FIRST_AUTHORIZER,” which will allow dApps to pay for the network resource costs of their users an open up EOS to new possibilities in mass adoption. The full list of features can be found in the EOSIO 1.8 Release Candidate article.

These 1.8 features are pre-requisites for the much hyped VOICE app from Block.one. Although no launch dates have been announced, these upgrades bring us one step closer to VOICE and opens up a lot of possible innovation for dApps! This is an exciting time in the world of EOS!