Changelog

Notable changes to the Makechain protocol, node, and documentation. Organized by month and grouped by category.

April 2026

Features

• Commonware v2026.4 upgrade — upgraded all commonware dependencies from v2026.3 to v2026.4, including consensus, p2p, storage, and cryptography crates.
• SilentLeader forwarding — consensus relay now uses ForwardingPolicy::SilentLeader, enabling targeted block re-sends to peers that missed a block instead of re-broadcasting to all peers.
• Secondary peers — new secondary_peers config (CLI: --secondary-peers, env: MAKECHAIN_SECONDARY_PEERS) for registering known follower nodes that receive broadcasts but do not participate in consensus. Secondary peers must dial in and are not actively discovered by the P2P network.
• Protocol submodule — protocol/ directory replaced with a git submodule pointing to officialunofficial/protocol, enabling independent versioning of the specification.

Fixes

• Empty reader block recovery — fix reader/follower recovery for empty blocks without falling back to full replay.
• PROOF_VERSION stability — keep PROOF_VERSION at 1; no existing wire formats require a version bump.

March 2026

Features

• Subblock architecture — non-proposer validators broadcast signed mempool snapshots (subblock payloads) to help the proposer build fuller blocks. Configurable via subblock_enabled, subblock_interval_ms, and subblock_max_messages. Broadcasts on P2P channel 5 with Ed25519 signature verification, validator membership checks, and staleness detection.
• TUI command center — interactive terminal dashboard (cargo run --bin tui) with embedded devnet node. Tabs for Dashboard, Blocks, Messages, Projects, Accounts, Mempool, and a Submit tab for composing messages directly from the terminal.
• MIP-3 identity cutover — documentation and client surfaces now treat owner_address as the sole canonical account identifier, remove legacy account-ID examples, and describe STORAGE_CLAIM as the only active Tempo-backed storage ingress path.
• Client library extraction — shared src/client/ module extracted from CLI with reusable transport, keystore, formatting, signer, and wallet utilities for building custom clients.

February 2026

Features

• Idle consensus throttling — drop the oneshot sender in propose() when the mempool is empty, using Simplex BFT's nullification mechanism to throttle idle rounds from ~100+/sec to ~5/sec
• QMDB runtime storage directory — configure commonware runtime's storage_directory for QMDB partition placement, replacing manual directory management
• Cold-start retry — gateway retries on empty gRPC response bodies during container cold start, ensuring reliable responses even when the node is booting
• Subscriber robustness — signal lagged subscribers and enforce per-connection subscription limits to prevent resource exhaustion
• Per-page markdown generation — enable AI agents to fetch individual documentation pages as markdown via <page>.md URLs
• Ask AI dropdown — custom AI integration menu in docs with ChatGPT, Claude, copy-as-markdown, and llms.txt links
• Interactive demos — six interactive demo pages (register account, create project, push commits, verify identity, fork project, manage access) with a reusable Demo component system
• Design system — 55 shape SVGs, brand guidelines, color system, typography scale, component library, and writing guide
• Health endpoints — /healthz and /readyz HTTP endpoints on the metrics server for load balancer integration
• Prometheus gossip metrics — P2P monitoring with broadcast/receive counters by outcome
• Consensus event metrics — track proposal, verification, and commit events
• Validator key file — --validator-key-file flag for production key loading (alternative to --seed)
• Structured startup logging — startup completion log with timing breakdown
• AddVerification CLI — add-verification command for linking external addresses
• ListKeys RPC — paginated key listing by account
• Multi-validator flags — --bootstrapper and multi-participant CLI flags for the node binary

Fixes

• Empty block disk exhaustion — stop infinite empty block production that caused disk exhaustion from snapshots; re-enable container snapshots with the default interval
• Snapshot restore logging — log the state root hash when restoring from snapshots instead of discarding it; remove redundant entries().count() call
• QMDB empty diff skip — skip QMDB persistence for blocks with no state changes as defense-in-depth
• NOT_FOUND for missing resources — return proper gRPC NOT_FOUND status for missing accounts and commits instead of empty responses
• Cursor pagination — fix 0xFF byte boundary bug in cursor-based pagination
• Search pagination — fix search_projects pagination and use saturating arithmetic for stats counters
• Verification count gate — enforce verification limit before processing claim
• Empty block liveness — ensure empty blocks still advance the chain
• Lazy account init — initialize account state on first key registration instead of eagerly
• Nonce overflow — use saturating addition for ref nonces to prevent overflow
• Commit count inflation — fix double-counting in commit statistics
• Name collision on restore — check name uniqueness when restoring a removed project
• Ref type immutability — prevent changing a ref's type (branch vs tag) after creation
• Owner-as-collaborator guard — reject COLLABORATOR_ADD/REMOVE targeting the project owner
• Reverse index corruption — fix key reverse index cleanup on key removal
• Chain stats accuracy — correct state_entries undercount and total_accounts source
• Missing metrics tracking — add track_request calls to 17 gRPC endpoints
• Gossip replay protection — reject already-committed messages in the gossip receiver
• State root snapshot — use actual state root in shutdown snapshot instead of zero hash
• Network flag validation — fail fast on invalid --network flag instead of silent devnet default
• Block hash verification — verify block hash integrity before storing in commit_block
• DA reference logging — log warning on malformed DA reference decode instead of silent skip
• Solana verification safety — replace unwrap() with error handling in verify_sol_claim

Refactoring

• Hex encoding optimization — use pre-allocated buffer instead of per-byte format!() calls
• as_str() methods — add as_str() to MessageType and other enums to eliminate format!("{:?}") allocations
• Reporter double-lock fix — return block response from commit_block to avoid double-locking in reporter
• lock_state() helper — extract shared state lock helper in gRPC service for consistent error handling
• Shared hex module — consolidate duplicate hex encoding functions into src/hex.rs
• Block build simplification — simplify build_block panic path in commit_block
• Debug derives — add Debug derives to public consensus and API structs
• Mempool optimization — eliminate message cloning in mempool drain and harden decode paths
• Reverse pubkey index — O(1) account-by-key lookups via 0x0B prefix index

Documentation

• RPC reference — comprehensive reference for all 32 gRPC methods with request/response schemas
• Protocol docs — scope requirements, storage limits, execution phase corrections
• Design system pages — brand, colors, typography, components, writing guide, shapes
• Key schema docs — updated with new prefixes (0x0A, 0x0B) and current test counts