Nimbus v22.8.0

[zahary]

Dear node runners,

We have a new release out!

Nimbus v22.8.0 is a medium urgency release, featuring full support for the upcoming mainnet merge! 🐼

https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/releases/tag/v22.8.0

All users should upgrade at their earliest convenience, but no later than 5th of September.

Since the network will go through the Bellatrix hard-fork on Sept 6, 2022, 11:34:47am UTC, failure to upgrade in time will result in inactivity penalties.

Please note that once the network reaches the terminal total difficulty (currently estimated to happen between 13th and 15th of September), it will no longer be possible to operate a beacon node without pairing it with a single non-shared merge-ready execution client. Nimbus is fully compatible will all execution clients and the required configuration steps for all of them are the same. Please refer to our merge guide for more details:

https://nimbus.guide/merge.html

To raise awareness of the required configuration changes, once the Bellatrix fork is activated on 6th of September, Nimbus will refuse to start unless a properly configured and authenticated Engine API end-point is provided through the command-line options --web3-url and --jwt-secret. If you need more time to complete the transition, you can temporarily run the beacon node with the command-line option --require-engine-api-in-bellatrix=no, but please note that such a setup will stop working once the network TTD is reached!

We would like to say a huge THANK YOU ❤️ to all of our users who provided immensely valuable feedback in the many months of hard work leading to the merge and to all the fellow research and implementation teams who made this historic release possible!

Onwards and happy merging!