Hello! 👋

Just to let you know, Sebastian and Matthias from the Hydra team have today released a new increment of the Hydra Head protocol, and with it, the first user manual. https://hydra.family/head-protocol/ 👀

This portal expands on the user guide, creating a central resource hub for anyone looking to learn more about the project. The Hydra team will be continuously updating it as the project evolves, while also adding more content around core-concepts and other Hydra-related info.

👉 As the first release that has the capability to connect to the Cardano public testnet, we’re inviting interested community members to help improve the documentation, site, and overall experience. Leave your feedback in our #ask-hydra channel in Discord: https://discord.com/invite/inputoutput

While Hydra Head users are some of the most technically-focused developers, we encourage everyone to share their feedback; after all, Hydra is designed to empower creators to build faster, more secure, and cheaper applications.

Thank you!

In less than one minute we’ll see the Vasil upgrade start deployment on the Cardano mainnet via a hard fork combinator (HFC) event. The team is ready and will be monitoring the network carefully over the rollover period. ⏳

While the transition should be smooth (thanks to the hard fork combinator!) you should anticipate a busier than usual network and a longer transition period over the epoch boundary while the network picks up the change.

We also expect some downtime on Cardano Explorer, in the meantime you can use cardanoscan.io or cexplorer.io.

Vasil will bring a number of benefits to Cardano including more efficient, more powerful smart contracts via new Plutus V2 improvements. Diffusion pipelining (a capability enabled with Vasil) will allow for further optimisation and continuing tuning of network performance over the weeks and months ahead. 🙏

👉 NOTE: Full Vasil capability will become available on the 27th September, along with the activation of the Plutus V2 cost model, delivering lower transaction costs for smart contracts.

If you do encounter any issues, please tag Becky in the #builders-general or #ask-spo channel in Discord. See you on the other side! 👋

Hi everyone! Today IOG launches its custom sidechains toolkit ⛓🧰

We released a blog explaining (http://bit.ly/3GCxwqh), and we are opening a channel for community discussion in our Discord, #ask-sidechains. Join here: https://discord.gg/inputoutput

After successful testing in the preview and pre-prod environments, the IOG team has now tagged and released node version 1.35.6 for mainnet! This release delivers Dynamic P2P functionality to the Cardano node, bringing more resilience to the network. Thanks to all the SPOs who have helped along the way! 🙌

With Dynamic P2P, SPO relays will be able to automatically connect to each other through self-discovery and optimization, replacing the existing manual peer selection process.

❗️ PLEASE NOTE: The P2P technology in 1.35.6 can be enabled explicitly for each node through the config file, but should only be run on a single relay on mainnet - SPOs are recommended to run at least two relays per block-producing node. You can read more about P2P and the configuration in the release notes here: https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node/releases

Starting by running a single P2P relay alongside the old node, this new functionality can be implemented gradually to safeguard network stability. The team will be monitoring the network behavior carefully over the weeks ahead and giving SPOs progress updates/upgrade recommendations as we go.

👉 If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to one of the team in the #ask-spo channel in Discord. We invite you to log any node-related issues you may encounter in IOG’s node repo here: https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node.

Thank you for your ongoing support, and again, a special thanks to all of the SPOs and others who have been involved in the development and testing of the new P2P capability so far. 🙏