animica 10.3.1 — current release

current release 10.3.1 consensus floor 10.2.5 pool.animica.org requires 10.3.1+

Upgrade to 10.3.1. It adds opt-in GPU compute + inference alongside mining, and pool.animica.org now rejects miners below 10.3.1. The mandatory consensus fork at block 75,000 has already activated; the consensus floor remains 10.2.5.

pip install -U animica
animica --version     # must print 10.3.1
# then restart your node / pool / miner

What changes at block 75,000

Total emission and the halving schedule are unchanged. Only the split of each block changes, and several dormant features switch on.

Computed from the node's own reward code against the shipped chain parameters. The inference slice is withheld from the miner whether or not anything claims it. Where it lands depends on one thing — whether any provider claims in that block. Nothing claimed: it goes to the treasury, so the treasury receives 50% of that block. Any claim: the whole slice is paid to the claiming providers, split pro-rata, and the treasury takes no share of it.

Also switching on at 75,000

• On-chain contract execution — the Python-VM executes contracts on chain, which is what the token launcher and DEX need.
• Value-carrying CALL — a contract call can move ANM. Until now it could not, which is why payment flows had to be accounting-exact rather than atomic.
• Bounded difficulty retarget — closes a trapdoor where a large hashrate drop could leave difficulty stuck.
• Uniform reorg bound — one finality depth every node agrees on.
• Quantum beacon — dormant by design; no observable change.
• Useful-work proof verification — see below. Shadow-mode on mainnet.

Pools: a second, separate reason to be on 10.2.2 or later

This one is not a consensus rule and it will not desync you. It is a payout bug, and it costs a pool real money the moment 75,000 passes.

Below 10.2.2, getBlockTemplate advertises the miner's reward before the inference carve is applied. From block 75,000 it reports 225 ANM for a block that actually pays the miner 150 ANM. Submitted blocks are still valid — submitBlock reads the real state delta — so nothing breaks visibly. But a pool that credits shares from the advertised figure pays out 75 ANM per block that it never received, out of its own hot wallet.

The fix existed since 9.x and was reverted by an earlier packaging commit; 10.2.2 restored it. If you run a pool, 10.2.2 is the floor for that specific bug — but 10.2.5 is the consensus floor for everyone.

Useful-work verification (shadow)

From 75,000 the node verifies any useful-work proof a block carries. Two properties make this safe to arm now, and both matter:

• It is presence-gated. A block carrying no proofs is valid at every height, and every block on mainnet today carries none. Activation changes nothing about current block production and cannot halt the chain.
• Mainnet defaults to shadow: the verdict is logged, never enforced. Enforcing is an explicit opt-in (ANIMICA_USEFUL_WORK_ENFORCE=1) and is not recommended yet — the payment-status input is still node-local, so an enforcing fleet could disagree about a block that carries a proof.

This is not "serve inference or you cannot mine". That rule would require every block to carry a proof, is a hard fleet-wide cutover, and is deliberately not at this height.

New in 10.2.x beyond consensus

• Your node can now actually serve inference. animica up installs the model bundles your hardware can serve, instead of only telling you to. Before this, a machine with no installed bundle registered with an empty tier list, so it could never be given a job — which is why the network had no serving capacity at all. This matters more from 75,000, when 25% of every block is reserved for inference.
• aicf.status reports honestly. It had always answered dependency_missing because the AI-compute methods read a context handle that never held the database. Explorers and monitors saw the module as disabled when it was not.

Bundle install runs in the background, smallest tier first, skips tiers already installed, and stops if free disk drops below 20 GB. Opt out with ANIMICA_AICF_NO_AUTOPULL=1; pin the tiers with ANIMICA_AICF_AUTOPULL_TIERS=tiny,small.

Do I need to do anything?

How to confirm you are actually upgraded

animica --version
# 10.3.1 — if it prints anything lower, the release has not reached
# your package index yet and you are NOT upgraded.

Then confirm the node is following the network, not a private view of it:

curl -s -X POST https://rpc.animica.org/rpc \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"chain.getHead","params":{}}'

Compare the height and hash with your own node's chain.getHead. Same height, different hash means you are on a different chain — that is the one case where you should stop and ask before doing anything else.

Delaying an activation on your own node

Every fork height is overridable by environment variable for testing, for example ANIMICA_FORK_SERVICE_CARVE_HEIGHT. Overriding a height on a node that is following mainnet is how you leave the network's ledger — the override exists for devnet and testnet work, not as a way to opt out of an activation.

Previous releases

• 10.2.5 — a block in which ANY provider claims pays the WHOLE inference slice to those providers pro-rata, instead of paying only the claimed amount and rolling the remainder to the treasury. Consensus floor. Inert until the first settlement anchor: with no anchors it is identical to 10.2.4, but every node must be on it before one is posted.
• 10.2.4 — installs every model tier the machine can serve.
• 10.2.3 — animica up installs a model bundle (superseded by 10.2.4).
• 10.2.2 — restores the block-template carve fix. Pool floor.
• 10.2.1 — aicf.status reads the real state handle.
• 10.2.0 — useful-work proof verifier, armed at 75,000 in shadow.
• 9.7.1 — canonical consensus for all forks at 75,000 (superseded as the floor by 10.2.5).

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