Testnet upgrade: v0.34

We’re pleased to announce the v0.34 Axelar node upgrade. This upgrade focuses on smart contract governance, Cosmos GMP improvements, and contains many bug fixes.

  • Axelar now supports voting on upgrades to the gateway smart contracts. With the new decentralized governance, any proposal submitted on chain can be voted on by token holders. This is achieved by the new call-contracts proposal type.

Read more about the RFC Read more about voting on-chain

  • When sending a GMP call CallContract or FeePaid events from Cosmos chains, a user or app can specify an optional refund address from the source chain.
  • We now provide a global logger that all code can use to track context in the context.Context object.
  • We have added an RPC endpoint for Axelar’s specific inflation rate parameters.
  • We added executed and failed status update events for the indexer, and include message names in poll events and other events.
  • The finality_override option in the vald configuration can now be set on a chain-by-chain basis to force it to query a transaction’s confirmation height instead of the is_finalized function through the EVM JSON-RPC. This is meant as a workaround for chains where is_finalized is available but buggy.

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

  • We have improved the way Axelar fetches data from the EVM chain in batches and confirms multiple transactions simultaneously. We can now send, receive, and track transactions more cheaply while also reducing system load and speeding up transaction confirmation by reducing the overall queue.
  • Upgraded to cosmos-sdk v0.45.15 and switched Tendermint to CometBFT v0.34.27 and upgraded IBC version to v4.4.0
  • We have improved the way we determine whether a transaction is finalized, we now keep the latest finalized block for each chain in memory. If the block height is lower than the cached finalized block, consider the transaction to be finalized. Otherwise, query for the latest finalized block and update the cache.

Instructions for 2023-September-7 testnet upgrade to axelar-core v0.34.1, vald v0.34.1, and tofnd v0.10.1. Release can be found here.

Upgrade height 9462850 countdown

  1. If you’re a validator or have delegated to one, please vote for the upgrade proposal via
Terminal window
axelard tx gov vote 46 yes --from validator
  1. Wait for the proposed upgrade block, 9462850. Your node will panic at that block height with a log: {"level":"error","module":"consensus","err":"UPGRADE \"v0.34\" NEEDED at height: ",. Stop your node after chain halt.
Terminal window
pkill -f 'axelard start'
# Validators need to also stop vald/tofnd
pkill -f 'vald-start'
pkill -f tofnd
  1. Backup the state:
Terminal window
cp -r ~/.axelar_testnet/.core/data ~/.axelar-lisbon-3-upgrade-0.33/.core/data

⚠️

Caution: If you backup the entire folder, ~/.axelar_testnet/.core, that’ll also include your private keys (inside config and keyring-file subfolders). That can be dangerous if anyone gets access to your backups. We recommend backing up keys separately when you first create your node, and then excluding them from any data backups.

  1. Restart your axelard node with the new v0.34.1 build.
  2. If you’re a validator also restart vald with v0.34.1 and tofnd with v0.10.1.

Example using join scripts in axelarate-community git repo:

Terminal window
# in axelarate-community repo
git checkout main
git pull
KEYRING_PASSWORD="pw-1" ./scripts/node.sh -n testnet -a v0.34.1
# For validators, restart vald/tofnd
KEYRING_PASSWORD="pw-1" TOFND_PASSWORD="pw-2" ./scripts/validator-tools-host.sh -n testnet -a v0.34.1 -q v0.10.1

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