Chia Blockchain 1.3 released – No more wallet sync

The big release we have all been waiting for is here – Chia Blockchain 1.3 has been finalized and released, and as of this writing the installers are being prepared for upload. This is a major version and there is a lot changed. (edit downloads are available)

Most of the big changes were released in the beta version that Chia has been trialing There are a few changes since then that are important, and one major bug. Before we continue though you should read the full release notes to get caught up, as well as my brief review of the beta. Here are a few of my favorites.

• CAT wallet support – add wallets for your favorite CATs.
• Offers – make, take, and share your offers.
• Integrated lite wallet sync – to get you synced up faster while your full node syncs.
• Key derivation tool via CLI – lets you derive wallet addresses, child keys, and also search your keys for arbitrary wallet addresses/keys.
• Added new config.yaml setting, reserved_cores, to specify how many cores Chia will not use when launching process pools. Using 0 will allow Chia to use all cores for process pools. Set the default to 0 to allow Chia to use all cores. This can result in faster syncing and better performance overall especially on lower-end CPUs like the Raspberry Pi4.
• Div soft fork block height set to 2,300,000. (editor’s note: we will discuss this tomorrow)
• CA certificate store update.
• Improved sync performance of the full node by doing BLS validation in separate processes.
• Fixed issues where the wallet code would not generate enough addresses when looking for coins, which can result in missed coins due to the address not being checked. Deprecated the config setting initial_num_public_keys_new_wallet. The config setting initial_num_public_keys is now used in all cases.
• Fixed issue where the DB could lose the peak of the chain when receiving a compressed block.

There are a lot of fixes to common issues people have been seeing every day, and this is a very good thing since a lot of those are usability issues that affect those of us that have been farming from day one. But it also introduces a bug that will be pretty off-putting for new users, and something that probably should have been resolved prior to release, in my opinion.

• If you are installing on a machine for the first time, when the GUI loads and you don’t have any pre-existing wallet keys, the GUI will flicker and not load anything.
  • Workaround: close and relaunch the GUI.

This means that every first time user will have an application crash (basically) on first load. That’s not great for adoption, especially in a release that fixes so many other issues. (Update: This is apparently resolved and was just not removed from the patch notes. It has now been updated to reflect that.)

All in all, I think this looks to be a great release. I have been using the beta version of the combo wallet on a few of my machines and I have found it to be very versatile and useful. I have already done the DB upgrade on my farming machine and it worked flawlessly. Let’s hope that 1.3.1 comes quick to clean up some of the bugs that can hamper adoption, but otherwise I highly recommend folks upgrade to this version.