Now Live: Aleph Zero Mainnet 14.2 Uqbar, Testnet 15.0 Menard 

Aleph Zero’s latest Mainnet upgrade—version 14.2 “Uqbar”—is now live, marking another milestone in the network’s path to full decentralization. With this release, all validators have successfully upgraded to Aleph Node 14.2, bringing critical improvements to block finalization and overall network robustness.

At the same time, we have just released Testnet 15.0 “Menard” which brings further updates towards network decentralization.

Highlights: Mainnet 14.2 Uqbar

Decentralization of the Block Finalization Committee

Until now, Aleph Zero had fully decentralized block production, but the block finalization committee remained under the Aleph Zero Foundation’s control. With the Mainnet 14.2 upgrade::

• Reserved community validators have taken over seats in the block finalization committee.
• Nine out of ten Foundation nodes have been turned off, reducing the Foundation’s involvement in finalization.

Additional Enhancements in Mainnet 14.2 Uqbar

Upgraded Substrate Dependencies

Aleph Zero has upgraded Substrate dependencies from polkadot-v1.2.0 to polkadot-v1.6.0, keeping the network aligned with the latest advancements in Substrate’s framework.

New Block Sync Protocol

The new block synchronization protocol improves how Aleph Zero handles forks and ensures seamless network recovery. Unlike chains relying on GRANDPA finalization, Aleph Zero’s consensus can finalize blocks on different branches—this upgrade minimizes any risk of sync interruptions and enhances node efficiency.

Removal of Nominator Limit

The previous cap of 1024 nominators per validator has been lifted in Testnet 14.2 Uqbar, increasing staking scalability and flexibility.

Please note that functionally Mainnet 14.2.0 is identical to the 14.0.0 upgrade. Version 14.2.0 has been introduced as part of the post-mortem actions following the February 12, 2025 incident on Mainnet, with versioning continuation instead of a rollback to avoid confusion among validators.

Highlights: Testnet 15.0 Menard

Testnet 15.0 goes even further in terms of decentralization, laying the groundwork for removing the setup with reserved community validator committee spots for block finalization. Instead, the algorithm chooses any community validator for block finalization sessions that meets the performance criteria–based on the ABFT Performance Monitoring introduced in this release.

On-Chain ABFT Performance Monitoring

Validators now report and share ABFT performance scores on-chain, enabling greater transparency and visibility into network wellness:

• Validators report how far other validators are behind the current ABFT consensus round.
• The scores are aggregated, multisigned, and submitted on-chain as an unsigned transaction.
• The data is made public on azero.dev–in Staking/Performance–so it can be tracked.

Increased Censorship Resistance in ABFT

This release improves censorship resistance in the ABFT consensus to enable fair participation and protocol robustness.

Low ABFT Score Banning

There is a new feature that allows banning validators with chronically low ABFT scores. Disabled by default, this feature paves the way for further validator accountability enhancements.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• NonTransfer proxies are now prohibited from engaging with the Identity pallet to prevent unintended interactions.
• Randomizing the validator committee per session to counter slow block creation, making the network more liveness-friendly.
• Improved resistance to randomness attacks, enhancing security even more.
• Introduced new network sync metric.

Moving towards full decentralization

These updates enhance network performance, improve stability, and strengthen security as Aleph Zero moves toward full decentralization in upcoming releases.Both Mainnet 14.2 and Testnet 15.0 are already fully operational–stay tuned for Mainnet 15.0, where permissionless validator rotation will take Aleph Zero’s decentralization even further!