Release Notes - v0.170.1

v0.170.1 (May 15, 2026)

Title: Validation hardening, protocol safety, and behavior clarifications

Date: May 15, 2026

Version: v0.170.1

Hi folks! Here’s what landed in v0.170.1.

✨ What’s New

• Confirmed no new features: This patch release focuses on validation hardening, protocol safety, and behavior clarifications.

💪 Improvements

• Strengthened reward withdrawal witness checks: Reward withdrawals that use key credentials now require the matching witness, which helps integrations reject unauthorized withdrawals.
• Improved canonical Blake2b-256 VRF key hash validation: Header validation now checks canonical Blake2b-256 VRF key hashes so outdated hash widths fail clearly during verification.
• Refined block local verification guidance: VerifyBlock and ValidateStage check block level rules, but they do not confirm full chain context consensus, which makes their scope clearer during integration.
• Sharpened pipeline drain visibility: Pipeline draining now counts work that is still finishing, which gives callers a more accurate view of pending block processing during shutdown and drain flows.
• Modernized node to client constructor defaults: Node to client constructors now normalize nil configuration values so integrations start from consistent defaults.
• Expanded handshake error clarity: Unsupported handshake versions now return a clear error, which makes connection failures easier to understand during integration.

🔧 Fixes

• Hardened duplicate key handling during data decoding: Data decoding now rejects duplicate map keys so malformed inputs fail early with a clear error.
• Stabilized unknown Conway redeemer tag handling: Unknown Conway redeemer tags now fail fast so invalid transaction data stops immediately with a clear validation result.
• Tightened expired distributed message draining: Notification draining now filters expired distributed messages so stale notices do not continue through the drain path.
• Restricted oversized collateral returns: Collateral returns that exceed the allowed size now fail validation instead of passing through.
• Enforced phase 2 fail closed behavior: Transactions that depend on an unavailable second validation step now fail closed instead of appearing valid.

📋 What You Need to Know

• Documented release note maintenance context: The prior v0.170.0 release note publication change updates release documentation history and does not change runtime behavior.
• Highlighted collateral return regression coverage: Regression coverage now protects the recently corrected collateral return behavior so future changes are more likely to catch a repeat of that failure.

🙏 Thank You

Thank you for following gOuroboros releases.

---