CosmosHub: Gaia v21 Software Upgrade

Background

The Gaia v21 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 one week.

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 Candidate & Changelog

The release can be found here.
The changelog can be found here.
To prepare for the upgrade, please review the upgrading guide here.

Proposed Release Contents

This release bumps Interchain Security (ICS) to v6.3.0 which brings the following improvements:

Enable consumer chains to use the memo field of the IBC transfer packets to tag ICS rewards with the consumer ID. As a result, consumer chains can send ICS rewards in any denomination and on any IBC channel. For example, a consumer chain could send USDC as ICS rewards.
Enable each consumer chain to permissionlessly add up to three denoms that will be accepted as ICS rewards.

The release also distributes all the unaccounted known denoms from the consumer rewards pool via migration.

Testing and Testnets

The v21 release has gone through rigorous testing, including e2e tests, and integration tests. In addition, v21 has been independently tested by the team at Hypha Co-op.

Validators and node operators have joined 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), or the Interchain Security testnet (provider).

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 (v20.0.0).

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.