HF28 v1.28.0

HardFork is not something that we do very often. That's because Hive is pretty much feature-complete on Layer1 and already a perfect tool for a variety of use cases where a fast, secure, and decentralized ledger is needed. We are doing lots of work on Layer2 (not in the scope of this post), but from time to time there are certain upgrades and fixes needed at the very core.

As discussed during the Core Devs panel at HiveFest 10 (Kuala Lumpur) earlier this month, the code for HardFork 28 is ready.

If you missed the panel, here’s the recording:

Time is set for 2025-11-19 13:00:00 UTC, if all goes well over the next three weeks and witnesses/stakeholders give it a go, it will go live at that time and once a supermajority of the top elected witnesses decide to run that version.

Test your stuff now

There’s still time to test your apps against the upcoming version using the mirrornet API node before we go live.

• API endpoint: https://api.fake.openhive.network
• Chain ID: 42
• Keys: in most cases you can reuse your mainnet keys
• Notes: treat it like a mirror/fake network; double-check you’re pointing at chain-id 42

For background, see my earlier posts about the mirrornet. If you already know what you’re doing, just switch your client to the endpoint above and run through your usual flows.

Changes

Based on the GitHub comparison, there were 4,036 commits and 5,197 changed files (331,273 additions, 648,056 deletions). That's of course simplified view on the master branch and only for hived repository itself. I'm not even including libraries, submodules or tests. Here's a simple visualization of a Hive consensus node source code tere and the changes that were made between version 1.27.0 and 1.28.0. I simplified it and smoothed it out for the sake of making it prettier (timestamps are normalized, and HEAD directory tree is used as base for init). Then of course image processing that took 77GB of raw, 60fps, 4k input and produced 10MB blog friendly webp output.

You are welcome ;-)

Read the highlights in the release notes

Known bugs (unlikely to block the HF)

Nothing so far that should stop us from proceeding with the upgrade. Current items on the radar:

• Snapshot loading/dumping issues - fixes will land in the next minor release.
• Claiming account creation tokens - that's more concerning at the moment; I've experienced similar issues on the mirrornet before, but at that time we were blaming the specifics of the environment, where multiple block producers were sharing the same state. That's under investigation. Kudos to @engrave and @techcoderx for spotting that behavior on the mainnet (and paid with battle scars by @engrave)

Consensus witnesses: please keep an eye on the https://openhive.chat/channel/witness channel and on-chain communication. Test your backup nodes first for few days and check the logs before running it on block productoin node, unless you know what you are doing. Especially if you haven't tested it on the mirrornet before.

That’s it for now. Please test, report anything odd, and get ready for HF28.