migration.md

Kava-3 Upgrade Instructions

Background

The version of Kava for kava-3 is v0.8.

🚨 Please note that an issue with tendermint v0.33 has been found that affects the stability of nodes running with the default pruning strategy. Please see the Pruning section for full details and mitigation 🚨

Many changes have occurred in both the Kava software and the cosmos-sdk software since the launch of kava-2. The primary changes in Kava are the addition of modules that comprise the CDP system. To review cosmos-sdk changes, see the changelog and note that kava-3 is launching with v0.38.4 of the cosmos-sdk.

If you have technical questions or concerns, ask a developer or community member in the Kava discord.

Risks

As a validator, performing the upgrade procedure on your consensus nodes carries a heightened risk of double-signing and being slashed. The most important piece of this procedure is verifying your software version and genesis file hash before starting your validator and signing.

The riskiest thing a validator can do is discover that they made a mistake and repeat the upgrade procedure again during the network startup. If you discover a mistake in the process, the best thing to do is wait for the network to start before correcting it. If the network is halted and you have started with a different genesis file than the expected one, seek advice from a Kava developer before resetting your validator.

Pruning

kava-3 uses tendermint version 0.33. Recent testing in Game of Zones and Kava has shown that nodes which are running with the default or custom pruning strategy have a memory leak that can cause nodes to crash and lead to irrecoverable data loss. Until a patch is released, the ONLY pruning strategies that are safe to run are everything (an archival node) or nothing (only the most recent state is kept). It is strongly recommended that validators use pruning="everything" for kava-3.

The pruning config is set in $HOME/.kvd/config/app.toml. Example safe configurations are:

pruning = "nothing"

and

pruning = "everything"

It is expected that a patch to tendermint will be released in a non-breaking manner and that nodes will be able to update seamlessly after the launch of kava-3.

Recovery

Prior to exporting kava-2 state, validators are encouraged to take a full data snapshot at the export height before proceeding. Snapshotting depends heavily on infrastructure, but generally this can be done by backing up the .kvd and .kvcli directories.

It is critically important to back-up the .kvd/data/priv_validator_state.json file after stopping your kvd process. This file is updated every block as your validator participates in consensus rounds. It is a critical file needed to prevent double-signing, in case the upgrade fails and the previous chain needs to be restarted.

In the event that the upgrade does not succeed, validators and operators must downgrade back to v0.3.5 of the Kava software and restore to their latest snapshot before restarting their nodes.

Upgrade Procedure

Set your node to produce the final block of kava-2 at 13:00 UTC June 10th, 2020. To restart your node with that stop time,

kvd start --halt-time 1591794000

Kava developers will update this PR with the final block number when it is reached. Make sure the kvd process is stopped before proceeding and that you have backed up your validator. Failure to backup your validator could make it impossible to restart your node if the upgrade fails.

1. Export state

kvd export --for-zero-height > export-genesis.json

2. Update to kava-3

  # in the `kava` folder
    git pull
    git checkout v0.8.0
    make install

  # verify versions
  kvd version --long
  # name: kava
  # server_name: kvd
  # client_name: kvcli
  # version: 0.8.0
  # commit: dee456557a0b478f8b2326e62f963fd0f43fbd0f
  # build_tags: netgo,ledger
  # go: go version go1.13.7 linux/amd64

  # Migrate keys
  kvcli keys migrate

  # Migrate genesis state
  kvd migrate export-genesis.json > migrated-genesis.json

  # Migrate parameters
  kvd write-params migrated-genesis.json --chain-id kava-3 --genesis-time 2020-06-10T14:00:00Z > genesis.json

  # Verify output of genesis migration
  kvd validate-genesis genesis.json # should say it's valid
  shasum -a 256 genesis.json
  # [PLACEHOLDER]

  # Restart node with migrated genesis state
  cp genesis.json ~/.kvd/config/genesis.json
  kvd unsafe-reset-all
  kvd start

Coordination

If the kava-3 chain does not launch by June 10, 2020 at 16:00 UTC, the launch should be considered a failure. Validators should restore the state from kava-2 and coordinate a relaunch. In the event of launch failure, coordination will occur in the Kava discord.