AtomOne v4 upgrade

The AtomOne v4 release is a major release that will follow the standard governance process. The on-chain voting period will last 3 weeks.

On governance vote approval, validators will be required to update the AtomOne chain binary at the halt-height specified in the on-chain proposal.

A full technical reference for the v4 release is published at [Hidden link] and is the recommended companion to this proposal.

Release Binary & Upgrade Resources

IMPORTANT: Note that AtomOne v4.0.0 binary MUST be used.

The release can be found [Hidden link]. The changelog can be found [Hidden link].

Proposed Release Contents

This release introduces the following major new features:

• Adopt the AtomOne SDK (github.com/atomone-hub/cosmos-sdk, versioned v0.500.1 and based on Cosmos SDK v0.50) as the canonical home for all AtomOne-specific governance, staking and fee-market logic, on a release trajectory independent from the Cosmos SDK
• Upgrade to IBC-go v10, and CometBFT v0.38
• Introduce Governors (ADR-006): a new class of governance participants that allows ATONE stakers to delegate governance voting power independently from staking, addressing the participation gap created by the Constitution's prohibition on validators inheriting delegator votes
• Add the x/coredaos module, translating the constitutional Steering DAO and Oversight DAO into enforceable on-chain capabilities (proposal endorsement, annotation, voting-period extension, and constitutional veto)
• Set validator commission to a network-enforced fixed rate of 5% and introduce the Nakamoto Bonus reward mechanism (ADR-004), starting at η = 3%, to improve stake decentralization
• Migrate the governance module from the atomone.gov.v1 Protobuf namespace to cosmos.gov.v1, with a backward-compatibility wrapper preserving all pre-existing atomone.gov.v1 query and message endpoints throughout the v4 lifecycle (the wrapper is scheduled for removal in v5)
• Migrate x/dynamicfee into the AtomOne SDK, with a fix for the unlimited block-gas (MaxGas = -1) edge case
• Add the 10-gno IBC light client, enabling future IBC connectivity with Gno chains running Tendermint2 and laying the groundwork for the Validation-as-a-Service shared-security model
• Backport consensus key rotation

The other changes can be found in the AtomOne binary changelog [Hidden link] as well as the AtomOne SDK changelog [Hidden link].

Schedule

With a three-week voting period, in the event the proposal is supported, it should pass around Jul 15th. The upgrade will be expected to take place the following week, at Jul 22th. The specific block halt-height is [Hidden link].

Testing and Testnets

The v4 release has gone through rigorous testing, including e2e tests and integration tests. The AtomOne v4 upgrade was also subjected to a security audit carried out by [Hidden link]. The full report is available at [Hidden link].

Validators and node operators have joined a [Hidden link] to participate in a test upgrade to a release candidate before the AtomOne network upgrades to the final release.

Potential risk factors

Although very extensive testing and simulation will have taken place there always exists a risk that the AtomOne experiences problems due to potential bugs or errors from the new features. In the case of serious problems, validators should stop operating the network immediately. Coordination with validators will happen in the #validator-private channel of the AtomOne Community Discord to create and execute a contingency plan. Likely this will be an emergency release with fixes or the recommendation to consider the upgrade aborted and revert back to the previous release of AtomOne (v3.3.0).

Governance votes

The following items summarize the voting options and what it means for this proposal:

YES - You agree that the AtomOne chain should be updated with this release. NO - You disagree that the AtomOne chain should be updated with this release. ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to the quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.