Summary / Problem definition

Marko and I have been kicking around the idea of "upgrade tooling" for about a year now. The motivation here is that it's pretty painful to upgrade Tendermint versions across any kind of block protocol-breaking change, because chains have to restart and lose all their history. With the introduction of things like starting chains at arbitrary heights, as well as the forthcoming work to version the heck out of everything, it should be possible to make this upgrading process a little smoother.

Proposal

This feature hasn’t been designed yet. Whoever takes it on should begin by talking to users to figure out what the requirements and the nice-to-haves are, and should probably investigate prior art in other blockchain networks. They should also consider how this plays with the Cosmos SDK upgrade module. Then a design doc can be drafted, taking into consideration feasibility and other constraints.

Possible approaches include:

• Dump all application state/history into a database and give people tools for querying it
• Migrate old blockchain history to a new format
• More??

For Admin Use

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