Curated from Helium Announcments :
Blockchain Release: Gossip Updates
The core developers have tagged a new 2021.07.09.2 Hotspot firmware release which contains a new blessed snapshot and gossip improvements. This is an optional but recommended release for Hotspot owners.
Since the release of validators, our block times have stabilized and the Consensus Group is operating at 50s blocks in order to catch up for slow blocks in the last month. This is expected and as the mean block time approaches 60s, the Consensus Group will automatically adjust.
Unfortunately, this means that some hotspots that have the ability to stay in sync have a long road ahead of them so we are issuing a new snapshot to try to catch them up.
We also want to acknowledge to the community that there is a significant portion of Hotspots across all makers that are behind on syncing. Some of the older hotspots and Hotspots with just 1GB of memory are experiencing issues loading the snapshot. We are still looking into solutions for this issue.
Read the engineering blog for all the details: Blockchain Release: Gossip Updates | Helium Documentation
No manual intervention is required if you are operating a Helium Hotspot or RAK Hotspot Miner. You will be automatically updated when the OTA is released to General Availability. Other manufacturers will need to update their fleets and owners will need to wait on their manufacturer to push an update to their Hotspot. DIY will need to manually update and Docker builds will kick off as soon as we tag the GA.
We have been beta testing 2021.07.09.2 since July 9th, 2021 5:00 PM PT. Current ETA for GA is 10:00 AM PT, July 10th, 2021.
