Protocol Upgrades

Some of the Pixa chain's rules can change without new software, because witnesses set them by vote. Others are compiled into the node software and change only through a hardfork. This page explains the three kinds of change, how a hardfork activates, what hardforks 29 and 30 changed, and who takes part.

Three kinds of change

How a hardfork activates

1. Release. Developers publish a new version of hived that names the hardfork's number and its earliest time.
2. Upgrade and signal. Each witness that installs it reports in its blocks the version it runs and the hardfork it votes for, with that time.
3. Quorum. The chain counts the scheduled witnesses voting for the same hardfork and time. Once a supermajority agree, the hardfork is scheduled. If support falls below that before its time, it is unscheduled.
4. Activation. The hardfork applies in the first block whose timestamp is at or after its time.
5. Nodes follow. Every node running the new version applies the same change in the same block. A node left on the old version computes a different state from that block on and must upgrade to follow the chain.

The required share is read from the chain, not assumed: get_witness_schedule reports hardfork_required_witnesses.

Hardfork 29

What it changed

• The reward fund's denominator. At genesis, Pixa applied Hive's hardfork 21 value for the total of recent claims: about 5.0 × 10¹⁷, a 2019 Steem figure. Every early payout fell below the 0.020 PXS minimum and was paid as nothing. Hardfork 29 lowered the total to at most 2.75 × 10¹³, about 18,000 times less. The first author reward was paid 110 blocks later (Proof-of-Brain).
• The hardfork quorum. It records, where the API reports it, the number of witnesses a hardfork needs, so that a chain running fewer than a full set of witnesses can still upgrade.

Hardfork 30

The release compiles in the activation time, and a node applies the hardfork only when the witnesses' vote names that same time, so a vote cannot move it earlier.

What it changed

• Small votes count. The dust deduction every vote pays fell from 50,000,000 to 50,000 rshares, so a full-strength vote counts from 2.5 Pixa Power instead of 2,500. A 100-Pixa-Power account, which could not move a reward before, now can (Voting and Curation).
• Witness pay is the nominal share. Hive weights each block's pay to spread 21 blocks' worth over the witnesses present, so with 9 witnesses each block paid 21/9 of the share and the chain issued about 11.3% a year in PIXA-equivalent terms instead of 9.75%. Since HF30 every block pays the nominal 15% share while fewer than 21 witnesses are scheduled: about 0.141 instead of 0.329 PIXA a block (Witnesses and DPoS).
• The DPF receives its exact share. Each block's share was converted to PXS and rounded down to 0.001, which at 51.833 PIXA per PXS paid 0.002 of the 0.0027 PXS due, about 11% of issuance instead of 15%. Since HF30 consecutive blocks pay the exact amount between them; hourly proposal payments stopped losing their rounding the same way, and the PIXA that does not fit into a whole 0.001 PXS when an author's reward is converted is paid to the author instead of burned (Chain Parameters).
• Custom operations are priced by size. A custom_json or custom payload costs Resource Credits in proportion to its length, where a 64 KiB payload cost the same as a tiny one (Resource Credits).
• A transaction carries at most 1,000 signatures, checked before any is verified (Transaction Lifecycle).
• Owner-key history is recorded, so that account recovery can undo an owner-key change made after 2026-10-07 12:00 UTC (Keys and Recovery).
• A witness needs approval from 1% of all stake to be scheduled (Witnesses and DPoS).

The release notes, doc/hf30-security-upgrade.md, describe the changes and the review that preceded them; this page keeps to what a user of the chain sees.

1.30.1, a release without a hardfork

Tagged on 2026-10-15 as "Bastion Anchor" (commit 7191f18), 1.30.1 merges upstream Hive 1.28.8. It carries no hardfork, so 1.30.0 and 1.30.1 nodes run side by side, and every value in its config.hpp is that of 1.30.0 (Chain Parameters). A node moves to it with a pull and a one-off replay (Run a Node). On 2026-11-03 all 21 scheduled witnesses and the six public API nodes ran it (condenser_api.get_witnesses_by_vote, database_api.get_version).

Hardforks 1 to 28

Hardforks 1 to 28 are Hive's, with Pixa's own settings built in, such as its issuance split and reward curves, and all of them applied at block 1. Chain Parameters lists every value that differs from Hive.

Who takes part

The last resort is a fork. If part of the community rejects a change, it can keep running the old rules as a separate chain. Hive did this from Steem in 2020 (From STEEM to HIVE to PIXA).

Few people take this decision. On 2026-11-03, 23 accounts had cast every witness vote for the 21 scheduled witnesses; on 2026-10-08, seven accounts, five of them with stake, had elected the 8 then scheduled (database_api.list_witness_votes; Decentralization and Safeguards).

Check the state yourself

Shellrpc() { curl -s -X POST https://api.pixagram.com -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d "{\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"method\":\"$1\",\"params\":$2,\"id\":1}"; }

rpc database_api.get_hardfork_properties '{}'      # last hardfork, and the next one with its time
rpc condenser_api.get_witness_schedule '[]'        # hardfork_required_witnesses, majority_version

Inherited → changed

Sources

• Hive whitepaper, §III.2.
• Code, at commit 48f75a2:
  • activation: database_hardfork.cpp:117-147
  • hardfork 29: database_hardfork.cpp:525-561 and 1_29.hf
• Code, at tag v1.30.0: 1_30.hf, the constants in config.hpp:255-282, and doc/hf30-security-upgrade.md.
• Code, at tag v1.30.1: config.hpp, compared with v1.30.0; the upgrade notes in the witness repository's README at commit fd14ef4.
• Live chain: condenser_api.get_block_header for blocks 342,000, 402,205 and 949,330; condenser_api.get_ops_in_block for block 402,315, the first author reward; block_api.get_block_range over blocks 900,000 to 949,330 for the witnesses' hardfork_version_vote extensions.