Release Notes

New features and enhancements

General

Storage

To support [AIP-32] Storage Deletion Refund, the DB is now able to track the time stamp of a storage slot being created, and the amount paid for the slot allocation.

Networking

Dedicated seed peers have been added to the default network configurations to allow new testnet and mainnet nodes to state sync more efficiently from genesis.

State sync

State sync was updated to default to “intelligent syncing mode”, allowing nodes to synchronize more efficiently in the presence of network bandwidth constraints.
Mempool

[AIP-44] Module Event: Aptos Move now supports a new module-level event framework called Module Event targeting to replace the current instance event framework. Module event framework associates every event stream with a static struct type instead of an EventHandle.
feature flag MODULE_EVENT will be enabled when appropriate.
[AIP-32] Storage Deletion Refund: Now that AIP-17 has been implemented and deployed, storage allocation is charged on a per-slot basis and according to native currency based pricing without being affected by the gas price. On top of that, we keep a record of the amount paid for the allocation and refund it on deallocation.
A Fee Statement is now emitted as a Module Event for each user transaction to reveal break down of the gas charge and the possible amount of storage deletion refund.
[AIP-45] Safe burning for user-owned objects: Add a mechanism that allows users to unilaterally transfer any owned-object to a global burn address.
[AIP-46] New Modules for ElGamal, Pedersen and Bulletproofs over Ristretto255: Adds new modules in the Move standard library for ElGamal ecryption, Pedersen commitments, and Bulletproof range proof verification, in addition to a few new natives for Ristretto255 elliptic curve operations.
- Requires enabling feature flag BULLETPROOFS_ENABLED
[AIP-48] Allow direct commission change vesting contract: allows the vesting contract owner to change the commission directly while keeping the same operator.

[AIP-33]: Block Gas Limit: A new blockchain feature that can terminate block execution when the gas consumed by the committed prefix of transactions exceeds the block gas limit. This ensures that each block is executed within a predetermined limit of computational resources / time, thereby providing predictable latencies for latency-critical applications that involve even highly sequential and computationally heavy transactions.
Fixed a security issue in metadata validation that could have allowed a malicious user to generate an out of memory condition when publishing a specially crafted Move module. Thanks to the CertiK SkyFall team for reporting this issue via our Aptos Bounty program.