EOSIO 1.5.0 Stable Release: Multithreaded Signature Verification, A State History Plugin, and Blacklist Security Enhancements

Updated as of December 5, 2018: EOSIO V1.5.0 has now been published as a Stable Release. This article was originally published to announce release candidacy.

Today we’re pleased to announce EOSIO, V1.5.0-rc1 as a Release Candidate. You can find more about EOSIO V1.5.0-rc1 detailed here on Github, and find documentation as it is updated on the EOSIO Developer Portal.

We are continually collecting feedback on how the community is building applications on the platform and constantly seeking to improve the developer experience on EOSIO. Going forward, new versions of EOSIO and EOSIO.CDT will be marked as ‘Release Candidates’ (-rc) when ready for first compiled release to allow for more thorough testing and documentation. After a few cycles of feedback, once documentation is completed, the release will be promoted to ‘stable’. In case of V1.5.0-rc1, it will be renamed to V1.5.0 and merged into master on the Github repository.

For the past few months, we have targeted the second Tuesday of each month (nearest the middle of the month) for a version update to the EOSIO software. Going forward, we will use this date to pin the Version Release Candidate (rc) so that the community can be aware of what is coming in the release prior to our merge into master for the “official release.”

Feedback is welcome on our continued advancement of developer tools and resources for the EOSIO Developer Community. Feel free to get in contact with our Developer Relations team by emailing [email protected] with your thoughts on how we can improve software development for the community.

Continue reading below to learn more about EOSIO V1.5.0-rc1.

Highlights in EOSIO V1.5.0-rc1:

Multithreaded Signature Verification (#6149)

One of the most important updates in this release is focused on our ongoing efforts to improve the performance of EOSIO, keeping it among the fastest public blockchains on the market. Multithreaded Signature Verification introduces efficiencies in key recovery, which is now managed on separate threads via a thread pool in the controller when applying a signed block. Primary performance increases will be noticed during block propagation and when syncing a new node.

State History Plugin (Alpha) (#5970)

We have also made a new alpha release of the State History Plugin that will allow real-time/streaming access to data on-chain. Akin to efforts with Demux, the State History Plugin allows for a more convenient way to get data through more web-scalable RPC frameworks. Overall this will be the basis for many scalability improvements in building on EOSIO and continued development will align this plugin with the needs of Demux to streamline and improve overall development efficiency when building applications on EOSIO. This plugin is being released as an Alpha and we welcome feedback from the community using it to learn how it affects your development workflow on EOSIO.

Whitelist & Blacklist Security Updates (#6318)

Finally, we have made some security updates to Whitelisting and Blacklisting. This is primarily for the benefit of block producers so that they can better respond to arbitration issues in the community and help resolve disputes and account recovery issues on the EOSIO public blockchain. The update enforces whitelist/blacklist checks for inline actions and deferred transactions for greater security while allowing exceptions for block producers who need to execute arbitration orders. This way, there will never be a need to remove any blacklisted accounts from blacklists at any point until it is time for the account to no longer be blacklisted.

Additional Issues:

A full list of issues for this release candidate can be found on GitHub in the Release. Remember, this release is pinned as a release candidate and will not be merged into master until we have completed testing and updated documentation. We are still providing this update now so that the community can be aware of what’s coming and plan for future updates!

Stay Connected

As always, if you are interested in providing feedback and working more closely with our team to improve EOSIO for the community, you can send our developer relations team an email at [email protected]. You can also hear about future updates by subscribing to our mailing list on the EOSIO Developer Portal. We are excited to be continually improving the usability of the software for EOSIO developers as we continue laying a foundation for the mass adoption of blockchain technology.

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