---
title: "Aurora and Borealis: Irys's First Hardforks"
slug: "aurora-and-borealis-iryss-first-hardforks"
canonical: https://irys.xyz/blog/aurora-and-borealis-iryss-first-hardforks
date: "2026-06-12"
author: "Gustavo Lobo"
---

# Aurora and Borealis: Irys's First Hardforks

**TL;DR:** Upgrade to mainnet-3.0.4 before June 23\. Just one command, a 5 minute migration, and your node is ready for both hardforks.

---

Irys's first two hardforks are scheduled. Aurora activates on June 23, and Borealis follows on June 30\. Support for both ships in mainnet-3.0.4, which is out now and already running on Irys-operated mainnet mining nodes.

A hardfork is a coordinated change to the network's rules, where every node moves to the new rules together at a set time. Some changes can ship in a regular release, but changes to the rules every node uses to agree on the chain need everyone to switch at the same moment, or nodes on different rules would drift apart. That is why these two changes arrive as scheduled hardforks with activation times, and why a network's first hardforks are a milestone: they are the first proof that the network can change its own rules with every node switching together and staying in consensus. It is a capability every long-lived chain depends on, and this month Irys exercises it for the first time.

If you operate a node, upgrade to mainnet-3.0.4 before June 23\. Nodes running older versions will stop following the chain when Aurora activates, so the upgrade is what keeps your node in sync.

## **What the hardforks do**

**Aurora activates on June 23, 2026 at 12:00 UTC.**

Commitment transactions are how miners register their obligations to the network: staking an address, pledging storage. They are part of how the chain knows who is responsible for what.

Until now, an encoding bug made these transactions hard to construct outside our own tooling, which kept most outside developers from building them.

Aurora corrects this. It introduces V2 commitment transactions with the fixed encoding and closes off new V1 transactions, so there is one correct format going forward. With the fix in, developers can build, sign, and submit commitment transactions from any language ecosystem.

**Borealis activates on June 30, 2026 at 12:00 UTC.**

Today, a miner's income arrives at two addresses: transaction fees for getting data into the submit ledger go to the miner address, while block rewards go to the reward address. After Borealis, every form of reward goes to the reward address.

Borealis also adds a new commitment transaction type that lets miners set and update their reward address directly. Previously, changing it meant re-staking the address. Now it is a single transaction.

## **How to upgrade**

Run the new version in place of the old one. No configuration changes are needed.

On first start, the node performs a one-time database migration that takes about 5 minutes. The node is offline for the duration, with no consensus participation or API access, and comes back up on its own once the migration completes.

The release is here: [mainnet-3.0.4](https://github.com/Irys-xyz/irys/releases/tag/mainnet-3.0.4)

If you run into anything during the upgrade, reach out to our team in the [Irys Discord](https://discord.gg/irys).