Release Notes - v0.70.14

v0.70.14

Title: Improve import performance, chain selection resilience, and operational visibility

Date: Not provided

Version: v0.70.14

Release: v0.70.14

This release improves import performance, block handling, chain selection, ledger and database observability, governance processing, and startup recovery. It also updates protocol compatibility and strengthens validation for blockfetch, forging, genesis, socket, and nonce behavior.

Recommended Network Compatibility ⚠️

Network	Compatible
mainnet	⛔
preprod-testnet	✅
preview-testnet	✅
musashi	✅

Runtime and operational improvements

• Upgraded gouroboros to v0.205.4 and restored Plutus conformance.

• Reused importer UTxO statements so repeated imports prepare fewer duplicate database operations.

• Cached imported asset statements to reduce repeated database preparation during imports.

• Read immutable blocks by position with ReadAt, preserving the requested read offsets.

• Persisted certificate rows and era-derived deposits while Mithril ingests gap blocks.

• Registered recycled peers after post-intersect rollback and added metrics for chain selection stalls and rollback registration.

• Hardened equal-slot alternative block forging to fail closed, adopted valid sibling blocks, and invalidated stale blockfetch state.

• Reported read and write connection-pool contention for the SQL store.

• Reconstructed nonces for blocks removed by truncation from surviving canonical checkpoints.

• Freed the shared readDB connection while measuring DiskSize and clarified WAL checkpoint guidance.

• Added per-block ledger composition metrics.

• Queued in-progress epoch stake-reward precomputation during startup.

• Decoded Conway committee authorization sum types, preserved resignations, rejected malformed committee data, and handled transactions with nil fees.

• Bound LeiosNotify cursor cleanup to connection ownership and connection lifecycle.

• Preserved VRF-key reservations across epoch boundaries by pinning epochStartSlot.

• Controlled discretionary chain-selection switches with a global rate limit.

• Deferred expired governance proposal deposit refunds by one epoch and preserved migration safety for DROP state.

Test and validation improvements

• Corrected blockfetch endpoint tests to parse complete protocol messages rather than muxer segments.

• Expanded apply-path coverage for operational certificate persistable-counter rejection.

• Pinned embedded genesis hashes and bounded Unix socket test paths.

• Standardized sibling nonce fixtures on 32-byte values.

---

Docs authored by Doc Holiday