Cardano Node 11.2.0 Pre-Release Adds Dijkstra Features for Testing

Intersect released Cardano Node 11.2.0 as a pre-release on October 28, adding tools for Dijkstra-era transactions and changes for node operators and developers. The release is not yet recommended for use on Cardano mainnet.

The software forms part of the preparation for Dijkstra, Cardano’s next ledger era. Linear Leios is being developed alongside that work and is not active in this release.

Dijkstra Transactions and Plutus V4

Node 11.2.0 extends support for Dijkstra transactions across several Cardano tools. The command-line interface, cardano-cli, now supports sub-transactions and guard credentials, which define authorization requirements for a transaction.

Sub-transactions are part of Cardano’s nested transaction design, which allows multiple transactions to be combined in a batch. Under that design, a top-level transaction can cover fees or collateral for the transactions it contains.

The cardano-submit-api service, which submits transactions to the network, can also accept Dijkstra transactions. The release adds a cost model for Plutus functions associated with CIP-0168.

According to the release notes, Plutus V4 is ready to use when protocol version 12 is active. Its available primitives currently match those of earlier Plutus versions on mainnet, with new primitives planned for a later release.

Configuration and Compatibility Changes

Node 11.2.0 reads its settings through the cardano-config library and supports a new versioned configuration format. The release also adds commands to convert, inspect and check configuration files.

Existing configurations in the older flat format remain compatible with Node 11.2.0. However, the network configuration files distributed with the new release use the updated format and cannot be read by nodes older than version 11.2.

The release also removes support for node-to-client protocol versions older than V_23. Wallets, indexers and other tools using that interface must be built with network libraries that support V_23, which has been available since Node 10.7.0.

The gRPC interface, which applications can use to access node data, has also been expanded. It can now listen over TCP using HTTP/2, with optional TLS protection. New methods allow applications to read and monitor the mempool, where transactions wait to be included in blocks.

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DijkstraNet and the Path to Node 11.3

The release supports preparations for DijkstraNet, the public test network intended for Dijkstra integration work. When the network reopened in October, it was running Node 11.1.3 in the Conway era ahead of a planned transition to protocol version 12.

Intersect previously outlined Node 11.2 as the release carrying the Dijkstra feature set without Linear Leios. The organization’s plan for Node 11.3 is to bring the Dijkstra and Leios work together in a hard fork release candidate.

Node 11.2.0 includes groundwork for both Leios and Ouroboros Peras, with those components disabled by default. Its release notes also introduce a new default ledger snapshot policy that would produce one snapshot per day on mainnet.