v22.3.0

Notes

Nimbus v22.3.0 is a low-urgency upgrade that marks the beginning of a more predictable release cadence for Nimbus. Going forward, we'll be publishing a new release each month, following a feature freeze period with intensified testing and monitoring of the introduced code changes on our dispersed fleet of mainnet validators.

Please note that the new versioning scheme is tied to the calendar. The number 22 indicates the year of the release (2022), while 3 is the month (March). The last digit is the patch number of the release and it will have a non-zero value only when we ship a hotfix during the month.

Improvements:

• Nimbus can now run as a service on Windows: use the --run-as-service flag
  #3441

• All command-line options can now be provided in a configuration file: use the --config-file flag
  #3442
  https://nimbus.guide/options.html

• Lower CPU and bandwidth usage, thanks to better handling of already-seen attestation aggregates
  #3439

• Reduced memory usage for nodes bootstrapped with trusted node sync
  #3429

We've fixed:

• Reduced performance on Windows due to the use of a less efficient method for collecting stack traces
  #3466

• Non-spec-compliant URLs in the Keymanager APIs for handling remote keystores
  4c01b77

• Extremely slow slashing DB import for validators with long validation history: the import should be nearly instant now
  #3393

• Validator index-out-of-bounds crash that was triggered upon certain requests to the /eth/v1/beacon/states/{state_id}/validators/{validator_id} API
  #3463

• An off-by-one logic error preventing sync committee messages to be published in the first slot of each sync committee period
  542e645

Deprecated features:

• The JSON-RPC service (--rpc flag) option is now deprecated. It's scheduled for removal in version v22.6 (i.e. June of this year). If you are currently relying on the JSON-RPC API, please consider switching to the official REST API.

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
a8840d114daa9ce6b7a6d988309e44158f20f86edd3930fd6fb45beed9d49f63fd20974cd419cc83b374e4d204376fc1bd51cdab268bef7474ef7752584a24ed  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
3223ec7a42ec6775449b5eaaa0aa42a0d2eb1470151613f699e5e5d3a11164fec579343196b67684b6d489bcf6495bea8457bac3e411e62347a6dfe487260600  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
9d399ef30e2a2bb9fc6b5e3f9f3667234b1be1dd8d2ba6b40d57ad7288d8e824c8da260ff65af39edb7815c0c820b4c669b205b012bb940ae9514e23b606b85c  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
4e91f72df61f5931e0254bd6b69f73ff5e68d89dbfb3556ade765360c96a4da5eef1dfba59ae0abe24fec864bc99e8ddbde2b4429bc8aac45cc3447a2b79c11f  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
0d97c9aa7dcbb46e0bdfef82d6e415ea7814180ec658573d067a694379f73a8535839728c9d65f2d7123ff600faa73b4ad9128a49a3a22fcdd5090e211ed246d  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
d48562eeb48973589598b685212f16ea66d96528684020bf0726ce33735cc184e50e548914ba26703f70d2defafe4083dd6735a4e494336f8b3d1a5ff8963952  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.7.0

Notes

Nimbus v1.7.0 is a low-urgency feature-packed upgrade, which brings support for trusted node sync (also known as checkpoint sync) and HTTPS web3 providers.

Of particular note: the Keymanager API now supports remote keystores (a.k.a web3signer keystores).

Breaking changes

• Nimbus will no longer rewrite HTTP(S) web3 URLs to their respective WebSocket analogues. Please review your setup to ensure you are using the right web3 protocol for your endpoint.

• The peer scoring has been further tuned. As such the --max-peers should not be set below 70. Note that Lowering max-peers does not significantly improve bandwidth usage, but does increase the risk of missed attestations.

Improvements:

• Trusted node sync: #3326

• Full support for HTTP and HTTPS web3 URLs: #3354

  • Nimbus now treats the first --web3-url as a primary and preferred web3 provider. Any extra URLs are treated as fallback providers (to be used only when the primary is offline). As soon as the primary is usable again, Nimbus will switch back to it.

• The Keymanager API now supports management of remote keystores (also known as web3signer keystores): #3360

• The typical memory usage of Nimbus on mainnet is now below 1GB (thanks to 128MB of savings): #3293

• Faster beacon node startup-times: #3320

• The REST API is now compatible with CORS-enabled clients (e.g. browsers): #3378

  • Use the --rest-allow-origin and/or --keymanager-allow-origin parameters to specify the allowed origin.

• A new --rest-url parameter for the deposits exit command: #3344, #3318

  • You can now issue exits using any beacon node which provides the official REST API. The Nimbus-specific JSON-RPC API will be deprecated in our next release, with a view to completely phasing it out over the next few months.

• The REST API will now return JSON data by default which simplifies testing the API with curl.

  • The notable exception here is when the client requests SSZ data by supplying an Accept: application/octet-stream header.

• Fairer request capping strategy for block sync requests and reduced CPU usage when serving them: #3358

• More accurate Nim GC memory usage metrics.

• BLST upgrade (latest version): #3364

• The web3 test command now provides more data about the selected provided: #3354

We've fixed:

• Unnecessary CPU and bandwidth usage: #3308
  • The result of staying subscribed to sync committee topics even when the client is not acting as a validator within that committee.
• Excessive logging on beacon nodes with large numbers of validators (in particular, those with --validator-monitor-totals enabled): #3332
• Deviations from the spec in the REST API; this led to sub-optimal performance when Nimbus was paired with Vouch.
• Naming inconsistencies in the "totals" metrics (this was produced by the validator monitor).
• Non-compliant implementation of the /eth/v1/node/health API (we were not producing HTTP status codes as mandated by the spec).
• Unnecessary restarts of the Eth1 syncing progress when the web3 provider connection was lost during sync: #3354

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
95f1695dd7404ee2413b71e2f3f00ba7faf3c3b3e07a9ca538ae5ab9fe99f6663e881e6a041bd6a7cacaf859f2ae096af69d54d24058ae2a6dad6979af393e0b  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
74637a15356df71c8a29df0046b3458d24d74b0c5b5f595d34b6770bb2be1d8fd852bac3b9a4161db7f5c4dd8396ce96c3cc65dd4f9564856fa7162a2c96712d  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
925be9b11e0cbc428a75fe8c729970a61d902a2a9f43f909fba4ba96eb0030c88a489038f2da0d8584f0a36046e95a6deed7f09c707ad966e048a916a4c282bf  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
848ea73a62b51ee5997e475d8eb89908e3057ebd70af3b837dd9d3b6ef520c3baf184535f400e45c5dc7ac627338665cccf4e69d9bf4860d285117168d2241c3  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
66872afb28f415eb3e5cab7e863b0d05d23274f1adec911530c1a63c656ff6930311fac00aa4b2227fb60e45606c81c5ab93403f1bc7029581197c5d078ec1e4  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
75ec522bd8800d289139f000bc19c70ff78fcce42c0579f7ee27654645190232ebd6ffcc0bf86f1a22ccc9098337488c32ddf50d816b35bf1770fd734f1435d9  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.6.0

Notes

Nimbus v1.6.0 is a low-urgency performance optimisation release with improved peer management.

v1.6.0 adds support for the Keymanager API (currently in BETA):
https://nimbus.guide/keymanager-api.html

As well as a comprehensive set of metrics for validator performance monitoring:
https://nimbus.guide/validator-monitor.html

Improvements:

• Tuned peer management: reduces the likelihood of missed attestations
  • If you've seen frequent "No peers for topic" in your logs, this release will help
• Improved buffer management in the networking layer: reduces both CPU and memory usage.
• Further optimised batch verification of gossip messages: provides a 2-fold improvement in throughput.
• Comprehensive set of metrics for live validator performance monitoring in Grafana and support for producing detailed historic reward analysis in ncli_db (note that ncli_db is available only when compiling from source at the moment).
• Support for the new Keymanager API: add, remove, and migrate validators on the fly (BETA).
• Blazingly fast historical traversals in the REST API for beacon chain data mining: state caching brings up to a 10x speed-up in some common usage patterns (e.g. obtaining historic data slot by slot or epoch by epoch).
• 3x speed-up in snappy compression and decompression.
• Support for obtaining JSON payloads from the REST API.

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
3f1ec9512a4cf6852d7d26d3a997ebc6304c797a412605eaf908f4ba43f5c3acda4019e92ef4f18e5258e5c4178e2f64c18cbf4877b330719cff46ca29aa54fc  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
02b19c3d69b1c4073a3b3e2e9f935abd5254505f8a1735e65ca3208385c8b22aa6a9600c212818b33a2f0900ad3f0ba3018c1c9155ccad3f4b4599c2b1d30d99  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
1e9bf23e985330bb23c5c7337502ad9cb3f84b3561488a4e764af30a3a40f54bc96c61367304bdded2ce8b356af7430e01627e86a36250aa2d223d59ed8a5b7e  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
61afc2a66626f0f0c1f7edafab6dafa410a95619c55e7c3d8c0b5daecff8fe5809350e9f4c4336f0f847736fce82a53f1f0fcc8783c8525aed1b1c9255ee379d  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
4866bdc1a00b32eeeab685f51a5ae02a5424a99d155966d520a13cc021a5b65c000e33dcdafc912b3516cac3972ed317ddc2f21505a2d26f84ae00d39bee5d82  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
4bdfeb94e7c0c65035df8ce824618093c12d05a7bdc731567066fcba5def394289fab483404df28285bced402dadeabfba458b78e3af9a116a1cf76de754284d  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.5.5

Notes

Nimbus v1.5.5 is a medium-urgency bugfix release which contains a number of significant optimisations; of particular note is a 6x speed-up in epoch processing and 2x speed up in Altair block processing.

In addition, v1.5.5 adds support for the web3signer protocol (currently in BETA). This allows staking pools and other providers with an advanced key handling strategy to use Nimbus.

We've fixed:

• The potential for missed block proposals when a third-party validator client (with at least one imported validator) was used with a Nimbus beacon node (with no imported validators): this happened because the --web3-url parameter was mistakenly ignored when running without an in-beacon-node validator
• A rare condition in which the REST service became unavailable
• Inappropriate error messages produced by the REST API: when a validator client published the same attestations or sync committee messages through multiple beacon nodes.

Improvements:

• 6x speed-up in epoch processing: #3089
• 2x speed up in Altair block processing: #3115
• A 12% (minimum) reduction in the outgoing GossipSub traffic: #3112
• Across the board performance improvements in the REST API: #3092
• The REST API can now report sync committee information for the next sync period: #3133
• Added support for the web3signer protocol (beta release): #3077

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
69f28f514ea8694d954b845ff71fddd85c533b988dd67eda44ad39e8005e3ee87f50f8ef3f8ad9df1ba4c5fcff6ff59d34016b30f84f8c71e88da5c2509f4654  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
80d3d4f6531625751f0e0c0d0ad55d923533316df4b72e4764d1b0ee68f71af64e219bc3faa4a793055caf067b52723171d3cfd6e6088ae054a5dc57ae3d137e  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
0c6129a909180e73640f408396d3601057c9b3f5391eca4dc082f7fed687a66ef623939b5d2ff249cbdf39d5c6c3ba2682cb43b43665a62a3a0991075e9bba07  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
0fc234f95cdb0e72baeb1d550333eadb4b87e421e25c38e422709d8ca7a8ca2ca49e67567d93ea2c9803dbbad8ed81fd52df63ce28a946781f798bec95c4b3a5  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
8893dead29b03c4c5f5254c85daf3d3cc5a19d9c77177df73c2bcd06f5c3e307ce73288b6eaa14fe9647369c3a80ddb30ba29d943ce5107e4f4bb15c93fe77c0  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
b51bd5aa2d783661c76230a6cc1830548caee86b9439300d52ecb9d14ecb4ad78f353357c9560e7dd6354fd339f3cc98fe92e03a84c485520ed8a9764605c149  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.5.4

Nimbus v1.5.4 is a medium-urgency hotfix release. It addresses an important issue which, in rare cases, can lead to the loss of attestations and sync committee messages. This can, in turn, lead to a reduction in rewards.

Please upgrade at your earliest convenience.

N.B there has not been a 1.5.3 release. We have skipped straight to 1.5.4 (which contains a last minute fix to the build system).

We've fixed:

• A rare issue during the construction of sync committee contributions: invalid BLS aggregate signatures were being produced under certain conditions; this had the potential to negatively affect the peer score of the node, and impact its ability to deliver gossip messages

• A non-spec-compliant implementation of the /eth/v1/validator/duties/sync/{epoch} REST API

• A crash in the /eth/v2/debug/beacon/states REST API call on systems with limited stack space

• A regression in Libp2p (incoming clients had no shortAgent, breaking the metrics)

Improvements:

• A nice little performance improvement for block verification and replay

• Improved error messages in the REST API

• The /eth/v1/config/spec REST API now returns more information regarding spec config parameters

• More flexible logging options: the log format can now be specified at run-time; see https://nimbus.guide/logging.html for more

  • Please note that the --log-file option is now deprecated and may be removed in a future release (if you wish to log to a file, we recommend redirecting the standard output)

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
f189f642f40848d2b25bef28a98547e8b9dd2aec7cdaf7e2a38b04c2a8aa187b0b0769e709ce0be5ee21f987f3c1534351e6b7640671305027c3c64a7d0aa68a  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
bf1b6370d21b28201f64e0e04d8890e01d27a12366c470096b94e946b4885e6a913d3c246fed87eddbc3f5b98c5b602345ad9a421d2410f3cecad7cc791d1341  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
1c12da2e23b24a690dab7fc86c1d9b0e5db72e87f6fb25d34f2630f7e5bf9bd974c8f110a6d6166373d32ba12609eb97646054cf9e19e499db3566e446d17a0d  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
73772ea4b34875e0720fc5ba62e517eb8989cefa824f5095b157dfd5757187fe7e19a1f591c367072f29e183a8d5381e59f79d9e505c5800b119c75c7991698c  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
2531ea8b3d6344e15668926c9da13507860e195810daa7a22bdddb964e610ae980d1bf35bd60431c060de28fe1e36aad98dd63743447f291ff11024c0b28be29  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
138e14199000cead14e857d00651d064e42e83c5d19da968236f7a4310f2565b39683ebc2b769d88465bcf68b7ece122839033ee68da94e6ffeaa8a528d51f94  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.5.2

Nimbus v1.5.2 is a high-urgency release for all users who haven't yet upgraded to the v1.5.x series. This series adds support for the upcoming beacon chain Altair hard-fork.

Please upgrade as soon as possible - before the 27th of October.

For users already running v1.5.1, this release includes a number of important bug fixes and optimizations; upgrading is highly recommended.

Notable changes

Improvements:

• Faster ramp up of peers when starting the beacon node

• New metrics for keeping track of dropped gossip messages (#3001)

• The run-*-node.sh scripts provided in our Github repository will now enable the --rest and --metrics options by default

• Increased performance and per-request limits of REST API - you can now query up to 16384 validators at a time

• Updated spec and spec tests to v1.1.3

We've fixed:

• Potential crashes triggered by certain JSON-RPC and REST API requests

• The long startup time which plagued beacon node restarts after the Altair transition

• Certain non spec-compliant responses of the REST API

• A rare condition in which attestation gossip would not be subscribed to correctly after sync

---

Notable changes (v1.5.0)

• Support for the Altair hard fork and the latest Ethereum consensus spec (v1.1.1)

• Our REST API is now feature complete, supporting the full Beacon API specification. This API should not be exposed to the public Internet as it includes multiple endpoints which could open your node to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

  • Known limitations: To use the REST API with a validator client, you need to enable the --subscribe-all-subnets option. This requirement will be removed in future versions.

• A new experimental --num-threads=X option allows Nimbus to take advantage of multiple CPU cores when verifying attestations. Set it to 1 to use one worker thread, 2 for two worker threads, etc. The default value is set to 1 in this release, but future versions will set it to 0 (this tells the client to use as many worker threads as there are CPU cores available). N.B .enabling anything other than 1 is considered experimental at this stage.

• Improved peer discovery logic that ensures good connectivity to all gossip subnets.

• A new version metric that makes it easy to keep track of client upgrades within Grafana dashboards.

• New metrics libp2p_peers_identity, libp2p_peers_traffic_read_total, libp2p_peers_traffic_write_total, subdivided through Prometheus labels by the client type of the peer (i.e. nimbus, prysm, teku, lodestar or lighthouse).

• BLST has been upgraded to the latest version (v0.3.5).

• The --network option now accepts a directory with custom network metadata in the format of the eth2-testnets repository. The SECONDS_PER_SLOT configuration value remains the only setting that must be supplied at compile-time through the -d:SECONDS_PER_SLOT=X nim compilation flag.

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
2e71f63cf6355e7e68b12da48a3b9fea0e91be90454d597cabff4aa305a4ad51c1694c2dcb8fa1f0e8d51ff314b5722a65e58a596b5f40dc6ae2e71d3a057075  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
7cc9a7c27c0c869efec3acc97bafc35449024504ee20fe47b764a347ce1596ace8b7508b7be5686c9ee3b003ab7848c353a9c969ec7141b84e15a104b54e882c  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
2cefcfe0a15574c3e557547cdf16602aac2cf7ea7d492dd1e5e92da73917824547272b6a4842b0f6aa4d45f286184f03e55a907b0f2b19afcd4c016800541d18  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
354f960fae078c4c5bf018f11079dab0c9138c9a663a0b0de728028186bcb6491f4717a2d79ccf333e490e1a030e4137b1303a36e9421bb01592f49a2cf18daf  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
705e80c01893f7ed8d0af991441175e9cb1f64c7f746c40f7003c70331fb12e84be7c868ebc918ef4379ffd1bbf57eb5cefb7b2b427955faa637cb3dd4843a21  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
8ffcbdb7d4cfc36ea8be17478326a77d72d56b82b827d2f5c26b8064147c4e7c26499a9cb57e951c90d67d36c8c50c5ac494081fd5f046088f0ad480434b79d7  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.5.1

Nimbus v1.5.1 is a high-urgency release for all users who have already upgraded to v1.5.0. It fixes a deposit contract syncing issue which manifests as the warning message "Eth1 chain not synced".

Under specific circumstances, such a failure to sync the Eth1 chain may result in missed Eth2 block proposals, so affected users are advised to upgrade as soon as possible.

For anyone still running Nimbus v1.4.x or earlier, migrating to v1.5.1 continues to be a medium-urgency but mandatory upgrade that must be installed before October 27th.

---

Notable changes (v1.5.0)

• Support for the Altair hard fork and the latest Ethereum consensus spec (v1.1.1)

• Our REST API is now feature complete, supporting the full Beacon API specification. This API should not be exposed to the public Internet as it includes multiple endpoints which could open your node to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

  • Known limitations: To use the REST API with a validator client, you need to enable the --subscribe-all-subnets option. This requirement will be removed in future versions.

• A new experimental --num-threads=X option allows Nimbus to take advantage of multiple CPU cores when verifying attestations. Set it to 1 to use one worker thread, 2 for two worker threads, etc. The default value is set to 1 in this release, but future versions will set it to 0 (this tells the client to use as many worker threads as there are CPU cores available). N.B .enabling anything other than 1 is considered experimental at this stage.

• Improved peer discovery logic that ensures good connectivity to all gossip subnets.

• A new version metric that makes it easy to keep track of client upgrades within Grafana dashboards.

• New metrics libp2p_peers_identity, libp2p_peers_traffic_read_total, libp2p_peers_traffic_write_total, subdivided through Prometheus labels by the client type of the peer (i.e. nimbus, prysm, teku, lodestar or lighthouse).

• BLST has been upgraded to the latest version (v0.3.5).

• The --network option now accepts a directory with custom network metadata in the format of the eth2-testnets repository. The SECONDS_PER_SLOT configuration value remains the only setting that must be supplied at compile-time through the -d:SECONDS_PER_SLOT=X nim compilation flag.

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
83ea5df9f8407aa19ec1e2694a939e9c38b92a9f331030cbbaa32df0b50d9334cb4dae3e8d8e6b58e6956a7aa318fe446d9a5ec4731e6f73cd6261dac7ba1e18  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
b255908016282d52fca1a255422b105422290a49215c752ead2dc410d0d933742811b33d1d50983532b18d4b5d552726fa6afd8626fab045731a1839d89cb0a7  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
2f041d25d66112e48ed52a958e5c705be258c5626985870e546f78ff7411a1d0776739ea33c7ad464bcff93b5589f811dc1c7b1a0d107f2246729e6bffa22a69  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
6546dd4dce00892f8610f251400a0be3eb7eefd48a39182ed5c2fc394be15ff968e312ffd101d8301dcaa9894bcea03dfa4382bff6a3727e8d7a9c1f094ef78a  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
b9394df27e98e968488264b9924a86a753a46a4fbef317fb06e16c3d9a9caee6eda7c686b780d8e24b51a3419ad3fc6bd72af8aba393dfaeebd0fc8d7ca23c58  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
9141d1f2eb58b07c4606f1269df57fd454709a709e3c73721e999b98ed40f66b7a9838633c890cd949d8244fa70b9e54488d3ee49751ff9192bad8284de03c12  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.5.0

Nimbus v1.5.0 is a medium-urgency but mandatory upgrade which adds support for the upcoming beacon chain Altair hard-fork.

Please upgrade at your earliest convenience - before the 27th of October.

N.B You must upgrade before October 27th in order to follow the mainnet beacon chain. Failure to do so will result in downtime penalties.

This is the first hard fork for the beacon chain, and while a significant amount of testing has been conducted in the run up to this release, we recommend users regularly monitor our announcement channels (discord and/or the newsletter) for potential updates.

To celebrate the feature complete release candidate of our REST API, we've opened up the ports on some of our fleet nodes - don't do this at home ;)

In order to interact with these, you should point your apps and tools to:

• http://unstable.mainnet.beacon-api.nimbus.team/ - mainnet data, the latest unstable branch
• http://unstable.prater.beacon-api.nimbus.team/ - prater testnet data, the latest unstable branch

Note that right now these are very much unstable testing instances. They may be unresponsive at times - so please do not rely on them for validation. We may also disable them at any time.

---

Notable changes

• Support for the Altair hard fork and the latest Ethereum consensus spec (v1.1.1)

• Our REST API is now feature complete, supporting the full Beacon API specification. This API should not be exposed to the public Internet as it includes multiple endpoints which could open your node to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

  • Known limitations: To use the REST API with a validator client, you need to enable the --subscribe-all-subnets option. This requirement will be removed in future versions.

• A new experimental --num-threads=X option allows Nimbus to take advantage of multiple CPU cores when verifying attestations. Set it to 1 to use one worker thread, 2 for two worker threads, etc. The default value is set to 1 in this release, but future versions will set it to 0 (this tells the client to use as many worker threads as there are CPU cores available). N.B .enabling anything other than 1 is considered experimental at this stage.

• Improved peer discovery logic that ensures good connectivity to all gossip subnets.

• A new version metric that makes it easy to keep track of client upgrades within Grafana dashboards.

• New metrics libp2p_peers_identity, libp2p_peers_traffic_read_total, libp2p_peers_traffic_write_total, subdivided through Prometheus labels by the client type of the peer (i.e. nimbus, prysm, teku, lodestar or lighthouse).

• BLST has been upgraded to the latest version (v0.3.5).

• The --network option now accepts a directory with custom network metadata in the format of the eth2-testnets repository. The SECONDS_PER_SLOT configuration value remains the only setting that must be supplied at compile-time through the -d:SECONDS_PER_SLOT=X nim compilation flag.

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz which corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

A note on peer count

If you don't allow for incoming connections, your peer count will be lower due to a new peer selection strategy. If you do have incoming connections set up, it's good practice to verify that all is working as expected - See the port-forwarding section of our guide for how to do this (metrics will tell you if you're actually getting connections).

To clarify, previously we would connect to spare peers for good measure - now, we delay setting up the connections until we need them, and end them if we don't.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
d2871373e46689cef8b01a400110b6be4d179f415a1d218d384a252bc057b3dbd3ca842807f6292490df8800e3bcd8111206988b862bef218a46e5baeb276d5e  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
5f8135a727f7714613b3720e2fd4440edc85fa0080a6bef808a75009fa9bf59e3b060a119d7afabf11c0e27df87689a928f4d759dd5f094772051d52291276cc  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
0cd4c3a45138bf22bee42b9cbbb78149d5ed1af425d3fa1aea02bc16ea01324f780a34f97b8ac0b82d31a5295785c735c3a2087fb2c4028f3e046adef4259d15  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
6a5732a9554edcdc8007a7b8696d20bb9d5fb4af9fcee5e4d8a07b627999ad03b7aa39ed9d346dcb1f7cb7b779da6d7e9bee6be3431873eab0efcf1599edcd24  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
956e14249580f75b8b15b1cef292beee84d1699b924878812da864f080ca53bbfad6ef2f9994f63df7a0c6a8829eb3da7c4c01393d6ac71842f80dd4c0d414b4  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
1dfd5a3e0f638ead603243479ff9278229c9bb6a3180ad242f46a5a16ae82752d6c517b23ea9b60f301beb5945f0f422d6c5cbb53c36c19364c1209fd5dc8d5d  nimbus_beacon_node

Altair beta build (rolling release, experimental)

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
ba0b8d8e6942ad26d4500ee907607c3d07b1b745819fa053efd39047943907640d83f74f0a0d02a8a7fc8fcf9707759c048ece7c5d70c158a74a305eeda92297  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
0381e02b8c144b4eebf727171e622c86c271b7ffce5f6d16c8a31b8ec25f7ac5335235149d76a6f6b9fe5fdd50ca150a54cfcd907a6edfe87005c18f71793c2d  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
119199d08bfb8c37e3f75df2dd15fd30b3ca3c5f775fcd022253cc057d792eaf909312e8416dd6ca8b7ec263f4d12fa22281916608dc004cc54fb6283609a274  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
3fbb77028ae2e78e59a26017b600e626dc2d8c6fca8dd78a09f0a116160e51f8db0866cfea08f9009dc03f5f0c58ca89f6be366d14cfd5d3f767342b67e4ad31  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
1c25ae9bfc32b7743933e54f14ee605f0e94800cd450bba4982d85717241e82e2afc5b74ed398e04f3e657ffcffee7df4ee43119830fa34847acf43bd4e27162  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
1155b0f766e1198186dd61bdf88866024a363fd2f54313d75475a510b248cdc74f0c71d13062ab90fee6ca939fce08e7bcd4796b0a61bd13990cd72f789b2332  nimbus_beacon_node

v1.4.2

Notes

Nimbus v1.4.2 - "Upgrade procedure: Hotfix release"

This release is marked as low-urgency for all Nimbus users other than those who have updated directly to a v1.4.x version from a version earlier than v1.1.0 - for these users this is a high-urgency release.

Notable changes

This release fixes an issue in the upgrade procedure when upgrading from a version earlier than 1.1.0 to 1.4.x.

How can I tell if I've been affected?

If you've already upgraded to 1.4.1, you can tell that you've been affected if you're seeing the following WRN log:

 Received invalid sequence of blocks

To re-iterate, this issue only affects users who are upgrading from 1.0.12 or earlier (released on 2021-03-10), and have not run any release in between. Everyone else can ignore this release.

Urgency guidelines

low-urgency: update at your own convenience, sometime within our normal update cycle of two weeks

medium-urgency: may contain an important stability fix, it is better to update sooner rather than later

high-urgency: update as soon as you can, this is a critical update required for Nimbus to function correctly

Binaries

Scroll to the bottom of this release and click on the tar.gz that corresponds to your OS and architecture: unpack the archive, read the README and run the binary directly (or through one of our provided wrapper scripts).

We've designed the build process to be reproducible. In practice, this means that anyone can verify that these exact binaries were produced from the corresponding source code commits. For more about the philosophy and importance of this feature see reproducible-builds.org.

For instructions on how to reproduce the build, see the included "README.md" file. See pre-built binaries documentation for more.

SHA512 checksums

# Linux AMD64
6d7343771f10d389c95f168d9216a1a45e3579a7fbc14ab307f9909afd03c8f2506080fff41d7b1860556158917a6a0737805037a0f74ea38e2599ddd6d4fb89  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM64
2d55b9575327e822232db7f84b934041f81af4a3cf05e932abca45ce249365e8292fe84d8e739d4c7bfdcd30c6270e7361bce040d78c9558bc38092f68ae3e92  nimbus_beacon_node
# Linux ARM
dced660ad674c8604fdd3fb873ac6cf2da3b272b301610d0b7d3f8ddd57ec82488b1aa68f702e972c12ecdde0f390e5198e9487d6309464ddc7ad6ec3f86b156  nimbus_beacon_node
# Windows AMD64
587e9eda46d45294619c49864b2cc12d612ed83b2562b469df475a6cb032577f6b3669f99e2cf4b39a8e2f512d6190f6a15145d4968029f465a32aa53720eadf  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS AMD64
e59289bfee4f64621c9f33d8b8bf834dd787d87a8c31b27b9fe48f81820411246f883613df2a4273e820f176774c4c04c259916119b936d6b0c3725d3696cd77  nimbus_beacon_node
# macOS ARM64
27679594e3707d54890299c7583fa5fd9018dca2e38ede7520f5585256fc29afe2916de7db3a6b6cb192f2bcbceb6306da1e57e1563a7c3b6b71cbb247313a1a  nimbus_beacon_node