At Nervos we’re excited to share that after much hard work with our many partners, the foundation and with the support of our community, we have collectively launched a Major Protocol Upgrade to the Nervos Layer 1 which we call “Mirana”. 

This is an exciting time, as many of the improvements that are now live have been in development for sometime and are extremely beneficial for all our partners. Now developers who are working on building on our Layer 1 they will be able to build even better dApps with many improvements over our previous Layer 1 version. 

Over the course of the next few weeks we’ll be going deeper into the exact details of the benefits of all the features launched with this upgrade. But for now you can read through a brief overview of some of the biggest highlights from this launch which we’ll be covering and going deeper into soon.

Contributing to RFCs on Nervos Web3

The Nervos RFC is a standard that enables the community to participate, suggest and comment on improvements to the platform. Without participation from our community it would be impossible for the platform to evolve and improve over time. Hence the reason why RFCs have played a critical role in the development leading up to the Major Protocol Upgrade launch. Many of the key feature improvements which you’ll read about below, were initiated and discussed first within individual Nervos RFCs. 

Upgrade Protocol Address Changes

Improving the protocol address format is one of the key tasks to helping improve the Nervos L1 to enable it to be more future proof. Previously with short addresses there was favorism for 3 different lock types which prevented some partners from not upgrading their libraries. Now in order to ensure that all parties follow through on upgrades for improvements to the Nervos L1 this upgrade removes the favoritism to make sure all parties are upgrading. Additionally this enables addresses to be more flexible and require less maintenance by developers in the future. 

Virtual Machine Versioning 

This part of the upgrade is arguably the largest and one of the most important parts of the upgrade and includes several major improvements to the CKB-VM which is the virtual machine that executes smart contracts on Nervos. With this upgrade the CKB VM will support two key features, RISC-V B extension and Marco-op fusion. Together both of these features will boost the CKB-VM performance and make crypto algorithms more efficient on CKB-VM to allow for even more functionality to be built on top of the Nervos Layer 1. 

Extensible Block Header 

This feature lays the foundation for the future roll out of the flyclient which is a form of a light client. What this means is that in the future you’ll be able to run a CKB node on practically any hardware device, something as simple as a phone or even Raspberry Pi. Additionally this improvement will work without sacrificing any security while maintaining trustless modes of communication and validation. This improvement lays the groundwork for flyclicent by providing additional block storage filed on Layer 1. 

Cryptographic Friendly Instruction Sets

With new cryptography standards growing in popularity such as Boneh-Lynn-Shacham or BLS for short, Nervos has now integrated this feature to enable better multi-signature security. These new cryptographic instruction sets provide defense against index calculus attacks and at the same time allow for shorter signatures than FDH signatures which improves the overall security for the Nervos Layer 1 and forms an even stronger foundation for the network. 

All these features are significant improvements that help propel the latest “Mirana” version of the Nervos Layer 1 to new heights in performance. We couldn’t be more happy to know that developers and partners who are working closely on our L1 will now be able to derive many immediate and future benefits from this Major Protocol Upgrade. This upgrade is key to enabling Nervos to grow at scale even faster and more securely well into the future.