Gaia v14 Upgrade

Background

The Gaia v14 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 (~ 1 week) and adapting the proposal as required, a governance proposal will be sent to the Cosmos Hub for voting. The on-chain voting period typically lasts 2 weeks.

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 Binary

IMPORTANT: Note that Gaia v14.1.0 binary MUST be used, the Gaia v14.0.0 binary is deprecated.

Release Contents

The relevant Github epic for this release is: Gaia v14 Release

The single change planned for the v14 release involves the update of the Interchain Security provider module for the Cosmos Hub. This update introduces a new feature: the cryptographic verification of equivocation. This feature will automatically punish validators for equivocation by verifying evidence of double signing and light client attacks on the provider chain.

Consequently, this change renders equivocation proposals, exemplified by proposal 818, unnecessary. Hence, the v14 release marks the deprecation of equivocation proposals.

The relevant forum post for the cryptographic verification of equivocation feature can be found here. The release can be found here.

Testing and Testnets

The v14 release will go 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, v14 will be independently tested by the team at Hypha co-op.

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 will have taken place there always 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 (v13).

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.