It’s finally here! The Pulse hardfork, otherwise known as Salty Saga, is about to launch on testnet. It’s been a long time since our last hardfork back in March — nearly 6 months. With that in mind, we want to run through the typical Loki hardfork process for any new community members going through their first hardfork, or for any veterans needing a refresher.
But first, here’s an overview of some of the biggest new features which are included in Salty Saga:
- Pulse consensus mechanism
- Lokinet name registration
- Changes to Service Node uptime credits
- CLSAG signatures
- Changes to the block reward
- Fixed Service Node staking requirement of 15,000 LOKI
As you can see, we’ve crammed a lot of significant changes into Salty Saga. There’s also a massive amount of non-user-facing changes, like:
- Overhauling RPC
- Merging upstream commits
- Changes to staking difficulty to accommodate for Pulse
- Changes to LNS hashing
- Changes to LNS owner retrieval
- Replacing large parts of Epee
- Fixes for Multisig
- Changes to Service Node key management
All of these changes will go live at the time of the hardfork, which makes this Loki’s biggest ever hardfork. But, because Salty Saga is such a gargantuan update, our plan for this hardfork is slightly different to the usual.
We aren’t setting a fixed timeline for this release, because we want to give ourselves (and the community) a proper opportunity to test (and potentially fix) the Salty Saga public testnet.
The public testnet will launch on September 19th and, assuming all goes well, will run for 1 week. In this scenario, we will announce the start of the week-long upgrade period on September 28th, with a targeted hardfork date of October 5th.
When the testnet launches, we’ll be looking for testers. If you’re keen to start testing (and potentially earn some Loki), reach out to Kee on Session or via Telegram (@keejef).
Proposed Timeline (subject to change):
As per usual, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us via [email protected], through our Session open group, our Telegram community channel, the Loki Project Discord, or you can also reach out to us on our socials.