This release contains a lot of preparatory work for important (and complex) lightning features: dual-funding, splicing and Bolt 12 offers.
These features are now fully implemented in eclair, but we're waiting for the specification work to be finalized and other implementations to be ready for cross-compatibility tests.
You should only activate them if you know what you're doing, and are ready to handle potential backwards-incompatible changes!
We also make plugins more powerful, introduce mitigations against various types of DoS, and improve performance in many areas of the codebase.

The detailed release notes can be found here

Verifying signatures

You will need gpg and our release signing key 7A73FE77DE2C4027. Note that you can get it:

• from our website: https://acinq.co/pgp/drouinf.asc
• from github user @sstone, a committer on eclair: https://api.github.com/users/sstone/gpg_keys

To import our signing key:

$ gpg --import drouinf.asc

To verify the release file checksums and signatures:

$ gpg -d SHA256SUMS.asc > SHA256SUMS.stripped
$ sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.stripped

Building

Eclair builds are deterministic. To reproduce our builds, please use the following environment (*):

• Ubuntu 22.04
• AdoptOpenJDK 11.0.6
• Maven 3.9.2

Use the following command to generate the eclair-node package:

mvn clean install -DskipTests

That should generate eclair-node/target/eclair-node-<version>-XXXXXXX-bin.zip with sha256 checksums that match the one
we provide and sign in SHA256SUMS.asc

(*) You may be able to build the exact same artefacts with other operating systems or versions of JDK 11, we have not
tried everything.

Upgrading

This release is fully compatible with previous eclair versions. You don't need to close your channels, just stop eclair,
upgrade and restart.