v9.0.0

Before upgrading please review https://github.com/stellar/stellar-core/blob/master/docs/software/admin.md#network-configuration

Focus:

Protocol updates Invariant support part1

Release notes:

To make things simpler to track and understand, we’re switching to version numbers setup as protocol_version.release_number.patch_number.

It then follows that this version is named 9.0.0 as it's the first version implementing the protocol version 9.

Stability improvements:

Improvements to the overlay code that should increase the chances to connect to preferred peers even when fully connected.

core is less pedantic when configuring nested quorum sets #1425

Protocol Changes (v9): Unify how validators can update network configurations with protocol changes - all network wide configurations are now gated by the PREFERRED_UPGRADE_DATETIME to allow for validators to agree in advance on when changes would take effect

Support for validators to vote for minimum reserve

Manage Offer Updates

always set aside the minimum balance when creating XLM offers #1430

Don't check for the fee twice #1220

New features:

Invariants are coming. In this release we’re adding the capability for validators to perform additional checks on transactions as well as integrity check of the buckets. Invariants are turned off by default.

Some work was done to enable parallel catchup (only used when performing full history validation for now)