[ANN] Exfer — A Peer-to-Peer Settlement Protocol for Autonomous Machines

[ahuman_exfer]

v1.13.0 — orphan-rate fix and reliability hardening, validated by a ~6-day mainnet soak

root cause: honest peers were getting disconnected and their blocks re-counted as orphans (~13/day). that's closed. across the full soak window the orphan rate sat at the natural tip-collision floor (under 0.6%), reorg errors and rate-cap disconnects and live-lock triggers all zero across ~290 clean reorgs, and the fleet held a single tip the entire time

self-mined block accept latency: ~5,200ms → ~21ms (~247× faster). single biggest measurable change

also in this release:

get_node_info metrics endpoint — operators can watch their own node (orphans, reorgs, peers, tip) without grepping logs
bech32m checksummed addresses — catches transposition typos the old raw-hex form couldn't. accepted everywhere; existing addresses keep working
datum-carrying wallet sends — quote-bound settlement now works from the base cli
a persistent public testnet with real low-difficulty pow — a place to try things without mainnet stakes

drop-in upgrade. mainnet consensus is byte-for-byte unchanged — no fork, no flag day. old and new nodes interoperate
https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer/releases/tag/v1.13.0

[_ili_]

this type of project is rare: a protocol created by an anonymous figure, a fair launch for miners. the figure behind Exfer isn't seeking exchange listings or seeking ways to generate hype and frequent publicity—it's fantastic. The autonomous economy is coming soon, and no one will be able to escape it; this is the most promising project I've ever seen. ahuman creates the code, and the others does the rest

[ahuman_exfer]

v1.14.0 — forward-compat groundwork for the p2p protocol. no user-visible behavior change today; the value is what it unblocks

what changes: nodes now negotiate a common version with peers instead of rejecting them for mismatch, and skip unknown message types (after authentication + a rate cap) instead of dropping the connection. the negotiated version is bound into the authenticated handshake, so mixed-version peers interoperate without weakening security

byte-for-byte identical to v1.13.0 at the current protocol version — pinned by golden-vector tests. mainnet consensus unchanged. drop-in upgrade, no datadir migration, old and new nodes interoperate

why it matters: the next feature landing — a transaction pull relay that fixes transactions occasionally sitting unmined — adds new p2p message types. after the fleet runs v1.14.0, that feature and future protocol additions can roll out gracefully instead of requiring a coordinated flag day

drop in the binary, restart
https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer/releases/tag/v1.14.0v1.15.0 — transaction pull-relay. transaction relay is now recoverable: a tx dropped by the best-effort relay gets re-offered and pulled by peers instead of sitting unmined

what changes: protocol version 6 with inv/getdata reconciliation (announce → request-missing → serve). periodic budgeted mempool re-offer so nothing stays stuck, bounded so it never starves blocks. v6 negotiates down to v5, so mixed-version peers interoperate — this is the payoff of the v1.14.0 forward-compat groundwork

for miners and node operators: fewer empty blocks, fewer stuck transactions. upgrade at your convenience, any order. the reliability benefit applies to any link where both ends are on v6

no consensus change. mainnet genesis and validation rules unchanged. no datadir migration

drop in the binary, restart
https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer/releases/tag/v1.15.0

[ahuman_exfer]

correction to the v1.15.0 announcement earlier — do not deploy v1.15.0. it advertises a newer protocol version that current-network nodes don't yet accept, so a v1.15.0 node fails to peer with most of the network and ends up poorly connected

if you upgraded to v1.15.0: roll back to v1.14.x. if you're still on v1.14.x: stay there

no consensus change, no funds affected — this is a peer-connectivity issue only, fully reversible by running v1.14.x. mainnet genesis and validation rules are unchanged

what happened: the transaction pull-relay mechanism itself is correct, but it was gated behind a protocol-version bump that isn't backward-compatible with the current network. a corrected build that adds the pull-relay without the compatibility break is in progress — it will negotiate the capability per-connection instead of bumping the advertised versionv1.15.1 — transaction pull-relay, corrected. safe to deploy on the current network. this replaces v1.15.0 (retracted yesterday for a compatibility break)

what it does: transaction propagation is now recoverable. a transaction dropped by the best-effort push relay gets re-offered and pulled by peers instead of sitting unmined. between upgraded peers, mempool reconciliation announces inventory and serves pull requests; older peers ignore the capability beacon and continue relaying as before

what's different from v1.15.0: v1.15.0 delivered this by bumping the advertised protocol version, which broke peering with current-network nodes. v1.15.1 negotiates the pull capability per-connection instead, leaving the advertised version unchanged. peers with every node exactly as before

no consensus change, no datadir migration. drop-in upgrade, rolling in any order — upgraded and older nodes relay to each other throughout
https://github.com/ahuman-exfer/exfer/releases/tag/v1.15.1