Paloma Weekly Wings: November 22, 2023 - Paloma and Pigeon Upgrade to v1.10.1 and The End of Unjail Scripts
Your new Paloma hatchlings this week?
Welcome to the weekly update on new software from the Paloma community of developers.
REMINDER WARNING: The Hatchling Paloma Network of “Messenger” (v1.10.1) and the Pigeon relay module is on v1.10.1. Paloma is still young, and its Cosmwasm and EVM contracts are still un-audited and undergoing continuous upgrades on protocol as well as on the smart contracts. The GRAIN token is launched but not yet trading on any exchanges. Although the flock is flying on the messenger mainnet, it is still subject to the continued development of Paloma’s cross-chain messaging system as well as to the security guarantees offered by the GRAIN token. We expect “Messenger” to experience weekly chain halts and chain restarts to upgrade. We also expect numerous undiscovered vulnerabilities. We also do not control nor influence the price of GRAINs. The community will strive to preserve state, which includes balances, but considers this mainnet high-risk. Proceed with caution.
1. Paloma and Pigeon Upgrade to V1.10.1
Gravity Bridge batch functionality testing on private testnet and public testnet revealed an issue.
On the Paloma-Testnest-15 network, we have a gravity batch stuck that is being relayed over and over again every 10,000 blocks. Pigeon actually sees the event on the target chain, but fails to inform Paloma because the gravity messages hadn't been registered against the sdk.Msg interface. This was most likely just forgotten in the bulk of work for gravity. This happened before with the AddStatusUpdate message, and apparently for some nodes this works just fine, while for others it doesn't and leads to a crash. Definitely needs more understanding. Either the type is registered or it isn't, and if it isn't, it should fail deterministically across all nodes. But it doesn't. The Pigeon upgrade was tested in private testnet, this resolves the issue and Pigeon successfully reports the batch as relayed. Another feature released was the removal of the usage of Paloma governed event nonces when attesting to observed events on target chains. Nonces (now emitted as part of the event data on the EVM light clients deployed to EVM chains) are still reported to Paloma per observer and cross-checked when making a report. This will also prevent batches from failing due to the high speed of the Paloma network. This upgrade of Pigeon v10.0.1 will become a required update for Paloma v1.10.1 when governance for the upgrade is successful.
2. The End of Unjail Scripts on Paloma
Unjail scripts are actively used by many Paloma validators to unjail their nodes when Pigeon is faulted and unable to either confirm RPC endpoint is active, that target chain balances are at the governance minimum, or that the validator is unable to send keep alive messages within every 5 minutes. When a validator uses an unjail script, they inform Paloma that their node needs to restart regardless of whether the problems that caused the jailing issue are resolved. The Volume team has added more logging and awareness of validator state and pigeon capabilities over the past releases. As such, now in order to guarantee delivery, the network notices that unjail scripts are bringing jailed validators back into the network that are unable to effectively relay. Thus, Paloma will now include a cooling off period. Paloma will slowly increase the duration in jail to up to 24 hours, where it caps after an unjail requests that is validated within 5 minutes. If a validator hasn't fixed the underlying issue and unjails after 24 hours, they will become protected by the grace period for about 5 minutes before becoming jailed again for 24 hours. We expect that within 24 hours, validators will be able to fix any underlying issues and unjail their validators with verified checks on RPC endpoint capabilities and target chain balances.
Stay up to date and follow the Paloma public repositories and the commits of ongoing upgrades to Paloma Cosmos-SDK blockchain and the Pigeon relay module, here:
https://github.com/palomachain/paloma/releases
https://github.com/palomachain/pigeon/releases
Pigeon of the Week: Florentine Pigeon (Florentino)
The Fancy pigeon Florentine – or also known by the names: Poule Florentin, florentiner tauben, Florentino, – the varieties derived from Bergamo (Lombardia), Italy, which was developed since the 19th century, and is thought to be the result of crossing the races pigeons Polish traditional races from the UK, to obtain varieties of pigeon meat. But in the latest development, the varieties belonging utility hen pigeons type is intended only for the sake of appearance.
source: https://www.pigeontype.info/2017/03/24/florentine-pigeons-florentino/
Conclusions:
Volume and the Paloma community continue to upgrade Paloma’s Gravity Bridge performance for high-speed messaging. These new features will continue to ensure quality delivery of messages and increased revenue opportunities for validators running on the Paloma network.
The Volume team continues to update Paloma’s Gravity Bridge to address batch event-nonce tracking and attestation. Compass-EVM upgrades and new votes will be coming this week to prepare for further Gravity upgrades.
We are excited for these features to enhance relay performance of the Paloma network.
To learn more about Paloma, please visit https://palomachain.com
To follow the project on Github, please star the project https://github.com/palomachain/paloma
To participate in the community, please join the Paloma Discord: https://discord.gg/HtUvgxvh5N
