Bitsong-2 Post Mortem Report

As per the proposal launched two weeks ago and after reaching consensus on the same day, BitSong officially announced that the execution date of the BigBang Upgrade would take place on October 21st, 2021, at 08:00 UTC.

Per an official communication, yesterday (October 21st) at 08:00 UTC bitsong-1 stopped and the BitSong Team immediately started the setup for the launch of bitsong-2.

While syncing with the Validators for the launch, we found an issue with the BitSong chain affecting some of the following parameters:

consensus_params.block.max_bytes and`
consensus_params.block.max_gas`
consensus_params.evidence .max_bytes

Therefore, after agreement with the Validators, we decided to apply a fix for these parameters. After performing a similar operation in testnet, we launched a new genesis.

We applied these fixes and synced with the Validator network. As soon as consensus was reached, bitsong-2 started creating the first blocks and stabilized.

Everything was working fine, but when we opened a block in order to take a look at some parameters, we realized that the export of the status had not worked as planned, as it hadn’t automatically used the genesis time based on the last block of the bitsong-1 chain, which should have been October 21st, 2021. Instead, the timestamp of the bitsong-2 genesis took the genesis time of bitsong-1 — March 26th, 2021.

Effectively, bitsong-2 went into production with an incorrect genesis time. Left unfixed, this would have created a disastrous scenario for the ecosystem.

After a pragmatic discussion with the Validator community, we agreed that we would stop bitsong-2, apply a new fix to these parameters as well, create a new genesis and launch a new chain.

At this point, we realized there would also be a need to change the chain-id. Since bitsong-2 had already launched, rewriting the genesis with the same chain-id would have created further major synchronization problems and other unanticipated issues.

As a result, at 11:00 UTC, bitsong-2b was launched and went into production with all the right parameters and thanks to the perfect synchronization of the validators it has been running smoothly ever since.

You can explore bitsong-2b live at:

- https://bitsong.bigdipper.live/

- https://ping.pub/bitsong.

We give enormous thanks to the Validators who went out of their way to mobilize and were invaluable in helping to correct the problems and make rapid decisions. With their support, we were able to reach perfect synchronization and quickly achieve consensus.

We will continue to monitor the progress and performance of bitsong-2b over the next 48–72 hours. Once we are satisfied that everything is running 100% smoothly, we will launch the governance proposal and open a vote to enable IBC.

We remind you that the voting period has been reduced to four days to facilitate the launch of a series of new tools and allow time for each of them to be tested and voted.

Thanks again to the whole community. We will keep you updated on all the events and steps that we will follow.

Happy bitsong-2b to everyone! 😊

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