Week 39 Dev Digest: PoC Challenge, DevShard v5 on Main, Proposal 108

Week 39 of 2026 (September 21-27) brought 25 merged pull requests across two Gonka repositories: 7 in gonka and 18 in gonka-docs. Two issues were also closed. Most of the week's work went into two tracks. The first is the v0.2.16 chain upgrade, which opened for public review on 2026-09-22 and gained its PoC Challenge feature. The second is DevShard v5, which reached main and now has a v5.0.2 patch in governance. The summary below covers merges through Friday, 2026-09-25.

PoC Challenge lands on the v0.2.16 branch

Proof of Compute (PoC) is how the network checks that each host really has the GPU capacity it claims. Regular PoC runs happen at fixed points in each epoch. PoC Challenge adds a spot check between those runs.

• PR #1811 by @DimaOrekhovPS, merged 2026-09-23, adds the challenge itself (104 files, +26,347 / -6,384). An approved challenger picks one active host and locks a payment. The host then leaves inference and runs PoC at full capacity until the next regular PoC. If the host keeps producing valid work, it keeps the payment. If a scored segment fails, the challenger gets the payment back and the host receives the same penalty as for a failed Confirmation PoC. Inferences missed during the challenge do not count against the host.
• PR #1828 by @cyberdelamain, merged 2026-09-24, closes a gap found during review of #1811. With poc_v2_enabled=false, a challenge could still be opened even though no vote on it could be stored, so the host would fail automatically. CreatePoCChallenge now returns ErrNotSupported in that case, the same error the vote handler already used.
• PR #1760, also by @DimaOrekhovPS, lets warm keys (the operational keys hosts keep online) submit MsgDeclarePoCIntent. The v0.2.16 upgrade handler backfills this permission, so hosts do not need to re-run grant-ml-ops-permissions.

The umbrella upgrade PR #1535 is open for community review. Besides PoC Challenge, it bundles trusted weight, dynamic model coefficients and transaction fee groups. MainNet still runs v0.2.15, so none of these features are active yet.

DevShard v5 reaches main

DevShard is the off-chain layer that runs inference. A gateway process (devshardctl) admits requests and settles payments against the chain. A host process (devshardd) executes them.

• PR #1584 by @a-kuprin merged into main on 2026-09-22 (954 files, +172,339). It collects the whole v5 line that governance approved as proposal 105 on 2026-09-18. The headline feature is height-sync, which gives each session a signed view of MainNet block height. It also brings HA storage, warm cutover and security fixes, plus 91,300 USDT in contributor bounties that have already been paid.
• PR #1826 by @qdanik moves gateway v5 to a per-escrow finalize lock. An escrow is the prepaid balance that funds a session. Before this change, one global lock made every escrow wait behind whichever one was finalizing. A new POST /v1/admin/devshards/settle endpoint settles up to 50 escrows at once (default 10). An escrow whose balance is only reserved by in-flight inferences now goes on_hold instead of being replaced too early.
• PR #1814 by @gmorgachev fixes SettleDevshardEscrow. A settlement arriving after a participant's epoch accounts had closed could roll its stats into the next epoch. It now checks GetEpochPerformanceSummary first.
• Issue #1762, closed 2026-09-25, reported that the host bridge dropped the escrow refusal_timeout and execution_timeout values. Host and gateway could then use different timeouts for the same session.

Security and host operations

• Issue #1572 was closed as completed on 2026-09-22. It reported that the MLNode endpoint /api/v1/train/start accepted requests without authentication. The same request could also set arbitrary environment variables on GPU workers.
• Docs PR #1453 by @snevolin adds a 1,274-line guide to running a high-availability DevShard host. In this setup, several versiond instances share one PostgreSQL database.
• Docs PR #1469 adds PostgreSQL sizing advice for that setup. Older devshardd releases size their connection pools by CPU count, so the default limit of 100 connections can run out. The guide recommends max_connections=250.
• Docs PR #1467 records that GLM-5.3-Flash has been an active PoC model since epoch 395, with a coefficient of 0.62.

Governance and documentation

• Docs PR #1471 announces proposal 108, DevShard v5.0.2. It fixes node failures on hosts that run several DevShard versions, where each version's Postgres pool could use up all available connections. Payload pools are now capped by PG_POOL_MAX_CONNS (default 4). The proposal also retires v3 and plain v4. The code is in PR #1840, and voting closes 2026-09-27 00:03 UTC.
• Contributor @Carol-6block merged 8 Chinese translation syncs. @Borjomik and @tcharchian made 6 updates to the network updates page and quickstart.

Closed without merging

Several gonka PRs were closed this week without being merged. They include a fee-group change for message types that have no group (#1831), a stream-cache completeness check (#1723) and a draft of session affinity for KV-cache reuse (#1550). Three CI workflows that would sync GitHub with Linear (#1440, #1441, #1672) were also closed, along with two test and lint fixes for the upgrade branch (#1786, #1787).

By the numbers

Coming up

Voting on proposal 108 (DevShard v5.0.2) ends 2026-09-27 00:03 UTC. Nothing is required from hosts, because versiond picks up the approved binary on its own. Review of the v0.2.16 upgrade in #1535 continues. That upgrade still needs its own governance vote before trusted weight, fee groups and PoC Challenge reach MainNet.