Yesterday, the Galileo hard fork upgrade of the Binance Chain testnet at the 24,020,000th block took place successfully.
.@Binance Chain Galileo Upgrade Announcement
The Binance Chain testnet is expected to have a scheduled hard fork upgrade at block height 24,020,000, around 2019/06/26 7:00 AM (UTC). Binance Chain Mainnet will also be undergoing an upgrade at a later date.https://t.co/0d46tN1qDx pic.twitter.com/FGsMs9WcTe
— Binance DEX (@Binance_DEX) June 26, 2019
This hard fork is an upgrade that is not compatible with previous releases and therefore 2/3 of the validators were required to upgrade in order to continue producing the blocks. However, there is no need to do anything on the user side, whereas those who work with full nodes must switch to version 0.6.0 by downloading the relevant code.
The main changes that have been introduced with Galileo concern:
- Delisting of trading pairs on Binance DEX, as explained in BEP6: if a token has problems or has low trading volumes for a long time, then the community can decide to remove the pair and validators can create a delisting proposal;
- Time Locking of tokens on Binance Chain, as explained in the BEP9 proposal: some projects may decide to block a certain number of tokens for a certain period of time and then unlock them according to a schedule in the future;
- Increased State Sync: the entire current state sync system has been restructured to improve the user experience by achieving a reduction in synchronisation time. Downloading the blocks can be resumed and now users can decide where they want to do the state sync;
- Match Engine Revision: The match engine now implemented on Binance DEX is not optimised for some cases and logical matches have been improved by introducing the idea of Taker and Maker, allowing for increased liquidity and reduced fees.
This Galileo upgrade complements the new Binance 2.0 interface, where margin trading has been introduced for all the users of the exchange.