Nano Node V21 Athena Goes Live with Performance Enhancement Updates

On June 16, 2020, decentralized, open-source, peer-to-peer (P2P) digital currency Nano (NANO) got a major upgrade as the project unveiled V21.0 of the Nano node with enhanced performance for deployment on the main network.

Nano V21 Athena Goes Live

Nano digital currency got a major shot in the arm recently as the team announced the deployment of V21.0 of the Nano node on the main network. Dubbed V21 Athena, the upgrade brings a slew of performance enhancements features to the Nano network including support for increased work levels, improved communication between nodes, and significant foundational updates for future releases.

The upgrade features a work difficulty increase. The changes, however, will not be activated until epoch v2 blocks are distributed at a future date. Users can go through the Upcoming upgrades section of the Network upgrades page for further details.

In order to enable better communication between nodes about performance, telemetry has been added between peers. This will allow users to discover various version details, account and block counts, and the current active difficulty, from individual peers. The V21 upgrade also brings the IPC2.0 background upgrade that will provide more performant communication to the node.

Additionally, the upgrade features a wide array of behind the scenes updates that will help in reducing resource usage by nodes, particularly network bandwidth.

V21 Athena Upgrade Notices

As mentioned earlier, the new work difficulty in V21 will be enabled after the distribution of epoch v2 blocks. As the work requirements will undergo a change at that point, all integrations generating work recommended reviewing the details on the Network Upgrades page ahead of the epoch V2 distribution.

Notably, given the fact that all active peers will be able to communicate via TCP, the UDP connections will be disabled by default in V21.

It’s also worth highlighting that despite keeping breaking changes to a minimum, the release comprises two RPC calls with such breaking changes: work_validate and bootstrap_status. Users are advised to carefully review the additional details on these changes included in the RPC Updates section.

At press time, NANO trades at $1.16 with a market cap of more than $154 million, as seen on CoinMarketCap.