The most difficult groundwork required to clear the route to distributed decision making via Proof-of-Stake (“PoS”) in Decred is nearing completion. While many users and interested outsiders are understandably keen to see a steady stream of new features, we decided to instead focus on making important structural upgrades before beginning work on the more substantive features that make use of Decred’s hybrid PoW/PoS consensus system. The major hurdle of upgrading Decred’s chain database format and related code is almost behind us, and it is accompanied by a substantial performance increase when both doing the initial chain sync (roughly 5x faster, depending on hardware) and handling many concurrent RPCs to the chain daemon. …