ReddCoin Core development update: September to November 2026

This ReddCoin Core development update covers the work since ReddCoin Core 4.22.9.5 shipped on 9 September. In that time we have merged 64 pull requests. The biggest wins for stakers are a wallet that stays responsive while staking, a set of staking correctness fixes, and a release line that now runs the same full test suite as our main development branch.

This is a progress report, not a release. Nothing here needs action from you today.

Plain answers first

Is there a new release to download?

Not yet. The work below lands in two places:

• The 4.22.9 release line, which becomes the next 4.22.9.x point release.
• develop, which becomes the next major version.

Most fixes went to both. 34 pull requests were merged into the release line and 30 into develop.

Do I need to do anything?

No. Keep running 4.22.9.5 and keep staking. If you are on an older version, get 4.22.9.5 from the official wallet download page. When the next point release is ready we will announce it with clear upgrade instructions.

The standing advice still applies: keep a current backup of your wallet.dat.

Why does the next point release need planning?

Some of the fixes tighten the rules a block or transaction has to pass. If only some nodes ran the stricter rules, nodes could disagree about which blocks are valid. These changes will ship together in a single coordinated point release, with notice for stakers, so everyone upgrades at the same time.

Key takeaways

• Faster wallet while staking. On large wallets the pause after each new block drops from about 10 seconds to about 200 milliseconds, and the staker no longer locks the wallet while it searches.
• Staking correctness. Fork handling, locked coins, orphaned stakes, coinstake fees and stake modifiers are all fixed.
• Wallet reliability. Encrypted HD wallets, mnemonic wallets, seed options and the periodic save are fixed.
• Consensus checks on the release line now match develop. They ship in the next 4.22.9.x point release.
• Builds and platforms. Notarised macOS releases, native Apple Silicon builds, and a fixed Alpine/Docker image.
• Testing. The release line now runs develop's full test suite, and every change to it is built automatically on GitHub Actions.

A faster wallet while you stake

On a large wallet, every new block used to freeze the graphical client for several seconds while it redrew the transaction list. Staking made it worse, because the staker held the wallet lock while it searched for a stake.

• The transaction list now refreshes only the rows a new block can change. The per-block pause on large wallets drops from about 10 seconds to about 200 ms.
• The minting table is built from your unspent outputs and updated row by row, instead of being rebuilt each time.
• Stake weight comes straight from the staker's search, so the client no longer recalculates it separately.
• The stake search no longer holds the wallet lock. You can use the wallet normally while staking.
• The wallet no longer asks the chain whether a confirmed transaction is final, which removes another per-block cost.
• The periodic save writes only what changed. It used to rewrite the whole wallet.dat every time.

Staking fixes

These fixes apply to Proof of Stake Velocity (PoSV), ReddCoin's consensus mechanism.

• Staking forks are validated against their own chain. A node can now correctly switch to a longer competing chain, even when that chain's stakes spend coins the node's current chain has already spent.
• Every available coin is staked. Previously a single locked coin could stop the rest of your coins from staking.
• An orphaned stake is abandoned only after its transaction has left the mempool, so its coins are not released too early.
• Block transaction fees go to the staker. Fees now go into the coinstake, and block templates account for them correctly.
• getblock and getblockstats no longer misreport coinstake fees.
• The genesis block no longer counts as having generated a stake modifier (the value that keeps future stakes unpredictable).
• develop only: stake inputs are now read from the set of unspent coins directly.

Wallet fixes

• An encrypted HD wallet now loads without losing its seed.
• sethdseed is refused on mnemonic (recovery phrase) wallets, along with related safety fixes.
• The -hdseed, -mnemonic and -mnemonicpassphrase startup options are no longer read. Putting a seed or recovery phrase on the command line is unsafe, so these options are gone.
• generatetoaddress stakes from the wallet you asked for, rather than the default one.

Consensus checks on the release line

These changes bring the 4.22.9 release line into line with develop. They are the reason the next point release has to be coordinated.

• A script verification check that had gone missing is restored.
• Transaction amounts and fee rates are range checked, with a new test on both branches.
• 256-bit values compare their full width. One comparison only looked at part of the value.
• Block time indexing is fixed, which repairs date-based rescans and pruneblockchain <time>.
• An intermittent crash during indexing is fixed.
• The network inactivity timeout can now be tested reliably.

Builds and platforms

• macOS releases are notarised by Apple, and the standalone binaries are signed. macOS should no longer warn that the app is from an unidentified developer.
• Native Apple Silicon (arm64) macOS builds are produced through our reproducible Guix build.
• The Alpine/Docker image no longer crashes at startup. The scrypt hashing code was using more stack memory than Alpine allows.
• Floating-point results are now identical across platforms. The consensus code that uses floating-point maths is built so every machine gets the same answer, and tests pin those results.
• The Guix toolchain is fetched from Codeberg, and the release security check works with current tooling.

Testing and CI

Most of this period's quiet work went into testing. It's the reason we can plan a point release with confidence.

On the release line:

• develop's full functional test suite now runs on the release line. A short list of known failures is tracked and being worked down.
• All 103 unit test suites, the Qt tests and the benchmarks pass.
• Every change to the release line is built automatically on GitHub Actions.
• Running the tests in that CI is nearly done. Trial runs have already found and fixed two real defects (the indexing crash and the timeout issue above). ARM, 32-bit x86 and Apple Silicon builds pass every test they run.

On develop:

• New CI jobs for native macOS on Apple Silicon and for current Intel macOS.
• Seven intermittently failing tests fixed, so a red CI run now means something.
• The dev fund share of coinstake fees is checked exactly.

What's next

• Test-enabled CI for the release line, which is close to done.
• Planning the 4.22.9.x point release, including the timing for stakers to upgrade together.
• ReddID work continues on develop.
• Known issues on the backlog: the release line's wallet-free build does not link, an intermittent "no valid coinstake found" in long test runs, and one block test that fails when run on its own.

The full list of merged changes is on GitHub.

Thanks to everyone running nodes, staking and reporting issues. Questions are welcome on Telegram, X and Bluesky.