Gaia v12 Upgrade

Background

The Gaia v12 release is a major release that will follow the standard governance process by initially submitting this post on the Cosmos Hub forum. After collecting forum feedback, a governance proposal will be sent to the Cosmos Hub for voting.

On governance vote approval, validators will be required to update the Cosmos Hub binary at the halt-height specified in the on-chain proposal.

Release Contents

This release contains the major addition of the Liquid Staking Module and a number of updates to core dependencies.

• The relevant signaling proposal for the Liquid Staking Module is #790. Liquid staking module: Regulated and efficient liquid staking.
• A full changelog and relevant binaries can be found here.
• The roadmap for this and future releases can be found here.

Testing and Testnets

The v12 release has gone through rigorous testing, including e2e tests, integration tests, and differential tests. Differential tests are similar to integration tests, but they compare the system state to an expected state generated from a model implementation. In addition, v12 has been independently tested by Hypha.

Validators and node operators can join a public testnet to participate in a test upgrade to a release candidate before the Cosmos Hub upgrades to the final release. You can find the relevant information (genesis file, peers, etc.) to join the release testnet (theta-testnet-001) here, or the Replicated Security testnet (provider) here.

Potential risk factors

Although very extensive testing and simulation has taken place there always still exists a risk that the Cosmos Hub might experience problems due to potential bugs or errors from the new features. In the case of serious problems, validators should stop operating the network immediately.

Coordination with validators will happen in the #cosmos-hub-validators-verified channel of the Cosmos Network Discord to create and execute a contingency plan. Likely this will be an emergency release with fixes or the recommendation to consider the upgrade aborted and revert back to the previous release of gaia (v11).

Governance votes

The following items summarize the voting options and what it means for this proposal:

YES - You agree that the Cosmos Hub should be updated with this release. NO - You disagree that the Cosmos Hub should be updated with this release. NO WITH VETO - A ‘NoWithVeto’ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned. ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to the quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.