Agoric OpCo is happy to announce that a new software release, agoric-upgrade-13, is now live on-chain! With a major improvement to the Agoric Smart Wallet and a host of IBC-related updates, Upgrade 13 further prepares the chain to host powerful interchain applications.
Auto Smart Wallet Provisions
The first major improvement in Upgrade 13 is auto smart-wallet provisioning. This eliminates a known friction point for new users; the need to provision a smart wallet before interacting with contracts on the Agoric chain.
Previously, new users were required to spend 10 BLD in order to provision a Smart Wallet before interacting with any Agoric contract. With Upgrade 13, this automatically happens during a user’s first interaction with an Agoric contract: 1 IST is added to the transaction fee during a wallet spend action (e.g., creating a vault on Inter protocol) where no existing smart wallet is detected against the user’s Agoric address, handling the provision seamlessly behind the scenes.
Switching the provision fee to IST also drives a longer term UX goal to ensure users can transact in the Agoric system with only IST should they so choose.
Cross-chain Capability Enhancements
As part of the Cosmos ecosystem, interoperability is deeply rooted in the design of the Agoric smart contract platform. It seamlessly integrates with the Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), linking it to 70+ blockchain networks which collectively sees hundreds of millions of dollars flow through it daily. The upcoming enhancements to the Agoric platform, including enhanced support for Interchain Accounts (ICA) and Interchain Queries (ICQ), will enable Agoric to facilitate more efficient cross-chain activities. These capabilities are poised to establish Agoric as the hub for cross-chain smart contract development.
To prepare for this capability, the Agoric chain needs to make a series of incremental upgrades to get to ibc-go V7 by February 2024. Upgrade 13 contains updates to ibc-go V4 on our pathway to that goal. This entails upgrading Tendermint to CometBFT 0.34.27, Cosmos SDK to 0.45.16, and ibc-go to 4.5.1
Stay up to date
Want to know what the future holds for Agoric? Check out the Product and Engineering Goals post on our Community Forum. And, make sure you follow @agoric on Twitter (X) and join the Agoric Discord server for all of the latest updates and discussions around chain upgrades.
