🚀 Bee v2.6.0 Is Now Live!

We’re excited to announce that Bee v2.6.0 has officially been released!

This update brings faster node startup, protocol readiness improvements, and a collection of important bug fixes, monitoring enhancements, and compatibility updates.

⚡ Faster Startup

Bee nodes now import postage batch data from a snapshot file by default, allowing them to skip syncing historical postage events. This drastically improves startup speed for new mainnet nodes, streamlining node deployment and reducing time-to-readiness.

This behavior is enabled by default, but can be disabled by setting this configuration option:

skip-postage-snapshot: true

Additionally, the fixed startup delay has been replaced with dynamic protocol readiness based which ensures that nodes begin protocol operations as soon as they’re actually fully connected to the network rather than waiting a fixed period of time, reducing idle time and improving responsiveness.

If you're running multiple nodes or deploying fresh infrastructure, these changes will save time and simplify the onboarding process.

🐞 Bug Fixes & Maintenance

This release includes:

• New upload/download speed metrics in the status protocol, enabling better performance analysis across nodes.
• A fix for inaccurate Prometheus vector variables, ensuring more reliable monitoring.
• Memory optimization: the number of background cache workers has been reduced from 128 to 32, lowering resource consumption.
• Clearer error messages during startup, including improved feedback when chequebook deployment fails due to insufficient funds.
• Deprecated CLI flags like swap-endpoint and swap-deployment-gas-price have been removed.

The release also upgrades to Go 1.24 and go-ethereum v1.14.13, improving performance, security, and compatibility with the latest tooling. Smart contracts and OpenAPI docs have also been updated, including removal of outdated auth entries and improvements to the /stake and /status endpoints.

For developers maintaining integrations or using monitoring systems, these improvements enhance clarity, stability, and debugging workflows.

📘 Full Release Notes

For a complete list of changes, see the v2.6.0 Release Notes. For technical details, view the v2.6.0 diff on GitHub.

🐝 Need Help?

If you're a node operator looking for support, join the Swarm Discord #node-operators channel where you can get answers from the team and community.