RougeChain node release — finality and game-ready contracts (2026-09-28)

Mandatory upgrade for every mainnet validator and full node. Three consensus changes are already active on mainnet:

A node without them cannot follow mainnet past block 150: from block 151 every block carries its parent's finality certificate, and from block 160 the header's state root also commits NFTs and contract state.

Production binary

This exact binary runs on both operator nodes. It was built twice from clean and the two builds were byte-identical.

Verify you are on the canonical chain:

• block 150 has hash 559e66ee9384aaeea91b5dc70285b3c1cbc2805dab1752632003c85007c81b52
• block 160 has hash 4592f38543195a6c619418f778e9897f09c99bab048a83afe29d8cdf5b5277c0
• state_root from curl -s localhost:5100/api/stats equals https://api.rougechain.io/api/stats at the same height

What changed

Exact JSON number parsing (required to follow block 177). A contract call's fee is gasLimit × 0.000001; for about 18% of gas limits that number prints with many digits (block 177: 0.0018369999999999999) and the previous build's JSON parser read it back one unit off, so nodes that receive blocks over the network rejected block 177. This build parses numbers exactly. It changes no rule and needs no activation height.

Finality (≥ 150). Validators sign ML-DSA-65 precommits; a block is final once signers holding more than two thirds of stake have signed it. From block 151 every block header carries parent_commit, the verified certificate for its parent, and a node refuses to import or build on a block without one. See Finality.

Player-signed contracts (≥ 150). contract_call and contract_deploy must be signed by the caller (POST /api/v2/contract/execute and /api/v2/contract/publish); the contract sees the verified signer as its caller, and the signer pays the fee (deploy 10 XRGE; call gasLimit × 0.000001 XRGE). Node-signed contract transactions are invalid. Contracts can read their call arguments.

Game-ready contracts (≥ 160). Contracts can hold and send custom tokens and NFTs, create their own NFT collection and mint to players, and draw per-transaction randomness (host_random). Moves made inside cross-contract calls are applied. The block state root also covers NFT collections and ownership and contract code and storage. See Smart Contracts.

API (no consensus change). POST /api/contract/:addr/query (free dry run), contract events paging (?before=&tx=), WebSocket topic contract:<addr>, receipts that report Failed when a contract call reverts, and the LP fee ledger (GET /api/pool/:id/earnings/:owner).

Upgrade

Stop the node, back up node-keys.json and the data directory, then build the public rougechain-node main branch and restart:

sudo systemctl stop rougechain-validator
cp -a ~/.quantum-vault/mainnet ~/.quantum-vault/mainnet.backup-$(date +%Y%m%d)
cd ~/rougechain && git pull --ff-only
source ~/.cargo/env && cd core && cargo build --release --locked -p quantum-vault-daemon
sudo systemctl start rougechain-validator

After the restart, compare the block 150 and 160 hashes and the state_root above with the public node. If anything differs, the node applied blocks under the old rules: resync from an empty data directory (keep node-keys.json).