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hardfork-activation-and-protocol-upgrade

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L1 trigger - audits bugs that surface only at fork boundaries / protocol upgrade points: activation logic, dormant code paths, upgrade epoch correctness, version gating.

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Injectable Skill: Hardfork Activation and Protocol Upgrade

L1 trigger: L1_PATTERN=true AND (fork_rules OR chain_config OR hardfork OR upgrade_handler OR x/upgrade OR ActivationHeight OR ActivationEpoch detected in recon subsystem map) Inject Into: depth-state-trace or depth-consensus-invariant Language: Go and Rust Finding prefix: [HF-N] Status: v0.1 draft (added from Round 4 gap analysis)

Orchestrator Decomposition Guide

  • Sections 1, 2: depth-state-trace (activation logic, version gating)
  • Section 3: depth-consensus-invariant (dormant code paths)
  • Section 4: depth-edge-case (boundary epoch + upgrade races)

When This Skill Activates

Recon identifies fork-activation, chain-config, or upgrade-handler code. This skill addresses a distinct bug class surfaced by Round 4: bugs that are invisible until an upgrade epoch arrives. The Prysm Fusaka bug (Dec 2025) is the canonical example — perfectly working code in v7.0.0, Critical-severity bug the moment Fusaka activated.

The defining feature: these bugs cannot be found by analyzing "current behavior" alone. They live in code paths that are dormant until a specific block height, epoch, or version condition fires.

1. Activation Logic

Every hardfork has an activation condition: a block height, timestamp, epoch, or version number. Verify:

1a. Activation condition is deterministic

  • The condition must not depend on non-deterministic inputs (no wall clock, no node-local config that differs across peers)
  • The condition must be a single canonical value per chain, not derived from a header field an attacker can influence

1b. Activation is atomic across all affected rules

If a hardfork activates multiple rule changes (new opcode, new gas cost, new pricing), ALL must activate at the same height. Partial activation = consensus split.

1c. Activation code is reachable

Check: the code gated by if block.Number >= ForkBlock actually runs. Dead code that was meant to activate but never does is a finding (late activation = missed hardfork).

1d. Test network vs mainnet

Testnet activation heights are different from mainnet. Verify: the code does not have a hardcoded mainnet block number that breaks on testnet, or vice versa. Every activation condition should be config-driven.

Tag: [HF-ACTIVATE:{fork}:{issue}]

2. Dormant Code Paths

The hardest class: code that exists for a future fork but has never run in production. Prysm Fusaka is the exemplar — v7.0.0 shipped with the Fusaka code path, but that path was dormant until the upgrade epoch. When it activated, bugs surfaced that no amount of testing on the pre-Fusaka chain would have caught.

Check

  • List every if chainConfig.IsXxx(blockNumber) gate in the codebase
  • For each, identify what code runs when the gate becomes true
  • Apply full L1 skill pack to that dormant code (it's effectively a new codebase that just hasn't executed yet)
  • Cross-check against the spec: does the code match the spec document for that fork?
  • Cross-check against other clients: has another client already implemented the fork? Run a differential against their implementation (this is the strongest check)

Tag: [HF-DORMANT:{fork}:{gated-code}]

Critical methodology nuance: dormant code is under-tested by definition. Any finding in dormant code should be flagged High or Critical because the production blast radius is the entire upgrade.

3. Version Gating

For protocols with multiple client implementations, version gating must agree:

  • Client A version X says "Fusaka activates at epoch 411392"
  • Client B version Y must say the same

Check:

  • Activation constants are consistent across clients (spec document is the source of truth)
  • If the activation is spec-defined, the spec must be referenced in the code (grep for EIP number, Cosmos ADR, etc.)
  • Client-specific feature flags must not alter the activation height

Tag: [HF-VERSION:{client}:{divergence}]

4. Upgrade Epoch Boundary

At the upgrade epoch itself, two rule sets coexist: pre-upgrade rules apply to blocks at epoch N-1, post-upgrade rules apply to N. At the boundary:

4a. Transition state

  • What state must be migrated? (New struct fields, storage layout changes, validator set format changes)
  • Is the migration idempotent? (Can be re-run safely)
  • Is the migration atomic with the activation? (Can the chain halt mid-migration?)

4b. Transition reorgs

  • If a reorg happens across the upgrade epoch boundary, do both old and new rules apply correctly?
  • Specifically: a block at epoch N (post-upgrade) that gets reorged back to epoch N-1 (pre-upgrade) — is the state consistently reverted to pre-upgrade rules?

4c. Consuming contracts

  • If the upgrade changes opcode behavior (gas prices, semantics), do existing deployed contracts still work? This is a consensus concern because a contract that suddenly fails at the upgrade height can cause chain divergence if one client handles the failure differently from another.

Tag: [HF-BOUNDARY:{issue}]

5. Rollback and Upgrade Cancellation

If an upgrade fails post-deployment, the protocol may need to be rolled back.

  • Is rollback supported? (Usually not — it requires a coordinated reorg)
  • If the upgrade handler panics, does it halt the chain (Cosmos x/upgrade pattern) or revert? Halting is usually intentional; reverting silently is a bug.
  • Emergency-pause switches: exist? Guarded by governance? Tested?

Tag: [HF-ROLLBACK:{state}]

6. Boundary Conditions

StateTestExpected
Genesis = fork blockchain starts at upgradehandled
Reorg across forkreorg to block before fork activationstate rolled back to pre-fork rules
Fork block + 1first post-fork blockuses post-fork rules cleanly
Missing client updatesome nodes still on pre-fork versionthey split off (this is the POINT of a hardfork)
Upgrade during chain haltactivation height reached while chain is haltedactivation applies when chain resumes

7. Output schema

  • Layer: consensus (activation logic)
  • Bug class: activation-gate / dormant-code / version-divergence / boundary-transition / migration-safety
  • Preferred evidence tags: [CONFORMANCE-PASS] (against spec + other clients) > [DIFF-PASS] (differential vs alternative implementation) > [LSP-TRACE]
  • Severity baseline: High by default; Critical if the bug can split the network at the upgrade epoch

8. Known bug exemplars

  1. Prysm Fusaka mainnet bug (December 4, 2025) — v7.0.0 was shipped with the Fusaka code path. At Fusaka activation epoch 411392, Prysm's handling of outdated attestations triggered thousands of historical state replays, dropping participation to 75% and costing 382 ETH in validator rewards. Rated High (not Critical) because 9 other clients kept validating. Crypto.news analysis; postmortem. Skill catch point: Section 2 — dormant code path that only activated at the upgrade epoch. Differential test against Lighthouse / Teku / Nimbus would have caught it.

  2. Nimbus Deneb consensus violation (v24.2.2 hotfix) — Nimbus deviation from spec at the Deneb hardfork boundary. Hotfix released to address the violation. Skill catch point: Section 1b — activation atomicity; Section 3 — version gating against spec.

  3. Polygon Heimdall V2 upgrade triggered Bor/Erigon finality delay (September 2025) — hardfork on Heimdall side caused downstream clients (Bor, Erigon) to experience finality delays. Cross-client upgrade coordination failure. Cointelegraph. Skill catch point: Section 3 — cross-client version coordination.

  4. Ethereum EIP-2929 activation (Berlin hardfork, 2021) — introduced warm/cold storage access, changing gas costs for state-touching opcodes. Multiple client-specific implementation bugs were caught pre-activation via testnets. Demonstrates the "dormant code" class — the bugs only surfaced once the code path was exercised by real traffic at the activation height.

9. Fallback if primitives unavailable

  • Grep for ForkBlock, IsXxx(, ActivationEpoch, upgrade_handler, UpgradeHandler, PlanUpgrade
  • Identify each activation gate
  • Read the gated code even if it's dormant
  • Cross-reference the EIP / ADR / CIP numbers in comments

Cross-references

  • Related: consensus-safety-invariants (activation code must preserve safety invariants), execution-client-hardening (opcode repricing / new opcode support), cross-environment-semantic-drift (forks of upstream clients may have drifted activation logic)
  • Consumed by: depth-state-trace, depth-consensus-invariant
  • Severity: docs/l1-mode/severity-matrix.md