feat: re-fork cometbft-bera onto the v0.39.x line

[fridrik01]

Berachain's CometBFT fork (bera-v1.x) is built on upstream v1.x line, which has been wound down in favor of v0.39. Security fixes and improvements such as the new libp2p networking layer now land only on v0.39, while our v1.x base is effectively unmaintained and ours to secure alone. Migrating onto v0.39 puts us back on a maintained line, and keeping PBTS and BLS aggregation preserves the block format so the move can be a rolling binary upgrade rather than a coordinated halt-and-swap.

This PR re-forks the berachain CometBFT customizations from the bera-v1.x line (CometBFT v1.x) onto a fresh v0.39.x base. That establishes the new bera-v0.39.x line. The line was created from tag v0.39.3 and has since adopted v0.39.4 through the standard sync-merge flow (#61), so this PR lands on a base that is current with upstream v0.39.4.

It is designed to be forward-compatible, so an existing bera-v1.x network can restart directly on this binary with no state migration. That works because the on-disk state and the consensus sign and wire bytes are kept byte-identical to bera-v1.x, which we verified against a bera-v1.x build (see Testing).

PBTS and BLS signature aggregation are always enabled on this fork.

Whats in it

• PBTS (Proposer-Based Timestamps). The block timestamp now comes from the proposer and is validated against the synchrony parameters, rather than being derived from the median of vote times. The per-vote timestamps are removed from the signed bytes.
• BLS12-381 signature aggregation. When a validator set is entirely BLS, the individual precommit signatures are collapsed into a single aggregated commit. That commit is gossiped as a whole and lets lagging nodes catch up quickly.
• NextBlockDelay (ADR-115). The application now sets the delay before the next height starts, replacing the static timeout_commit from config.
• NextProposerAddress. ProcessProposal now carries the address of the next block proposer.
• Privval support for the fork's signing needs. The remote signer protocol gains a SignBytes request, and BLS public keys are handled in compressed form.

The #5860 blocksync fix (sender binding plus a signature-count cap) is not part of this PRs diff because it did not need porting. It reached the fork through the upstream v0.39.4 sync (#61) that this branch now sits on.

How to review

Most of the diff is a faithful port of code that already runs in bera-v1.x production, so the review effort is best spent on the parts that had to change specifically for v0.39.

There is one caveat on method. Provenance cannot be shown with a mechanical diff, because the bera-v1.x line moved its packages under internal/ and api/ and renamed the proto packages from cometbft.* to tendermint.*. A file-to-file diff therefore does not line up, and the split below is curated by hand.

The following can be skimmed, since they are faithful ports and need little review:

• crypto/bls12381, the aggregation primitives. The only change is a build-tag split and an alias relocation.
• The generated .pb.go files. Review the .proto files and the wire facts instead of the generated Go.
• verifyAggregatedCommit and MakeBLSCommit (in types/validation.go and types/vote_set.go), IsTimely (in types/proposal.go), and the bulk of the function bodies in consensus/state.go.

The following deserve close review, since they exist only because of the back-port and are where bugs would hide:

• LastCommit is now an interface (VoteSetReader) that holds either a *VoteSet or a whole aggregated *Commit. This required guarded type assertions at roughly six call sites, plus a cmtjson registration so that the /dump_consensus_state endpoint still works. See consensus/state.go, consensus/types/round_state.go, types/block.go, and types/vote_set.go.
• BLS is build-tag optional, because v0.39 must still compile without blst. An aggregation_none.go stub and a canAggregateCommits fallback gate the aggregated path. See crypto/bls12381/aggregation_none.go and consensus/state.go.
• ADR-115 is grafted onto a scheduler that previously only knew timeout_commit. The commit timeout is now derived from state.NextBlockDelay, with a fallback to config.TimeoutCommit. See consensus/state.go, state/state.go, and state/execution.go.
• The proto and toolchain changes include gogofaster codegen, a mapping from wrappers to gogo, moving the authority field from 6 to 8, and a hand-written Wrap and Unwrap for the new Commit message. See buf.gen.yaml and proto/tendermint/consensus/message.go.
• The validator key wire format changed so that ToProto and FromProto now write pub_key_bytes and pub_key_type, with a fallback to the legacy pub_key. See types/validator.go and crypto/encoding/codec.go.
• PBTS is plumbed into existing v0.39 call sites. NewProposal now takes the block time, which is threaded through about twenty callers. In addition, privval/file.go drops the obsolete path that re-signed a vote when only its timestamp differed, and a ProposalTimestampDifference metric was added. See types/proposal.go, privval/file.go, and consensus/metrics.go.

The three features are coupled through the VoteSetReader change, which is why they ship as a single PR rather than three.

Review follow-ups

Auditing the branch against bera-v1.x during review surfaced two fixes that postdate the re-fork snapshot. Both are now on this branch.

• The round>10 PBTS timeliness bypass is removed (f456b4f). The bypass was a bera-v1.x stopgap (fix #17) for a synchrony-parameter overflow at high rounds. The overflow was fixed properly upstream (fix(pbts): hardening tests for overflows in SynchronyParams cometbft/cometbft#4816) and the bypass was removed on bera-v1.x in chore(state): avoid 10 round check for timeliness #50, The commit re-applies chore(state): avoid 10 round check for timeliness #50 and ports its regression test.
• Gossiped whole commits are capped at MaxVotesCount signatures (49564d1), a cherry-pick of fix(consensus): reject gossiped commits with more than MaxVotesCount … #54.

Wire and upgrade compatibility

• The on-disk state and the consensus sign and wire bytes are byte-identical to bera-v1.x, so an existing network can restart on this binary.
• Upgrades can roll through a mixed validator set. The consensus p2p wire format is aligned with bera-v1.x (f8b4e4f), with the fork's two extra messages pinned to their bera-v1.x field numbers (has_proposal_block_part at 10 and the whole commit at 11), so old and new binaries gossip with each other during the rollout.
• The change is state-breaking relative to a pristine v0.39.4, owing to the new parameters and the removal of vote timestamps. That is the intended bera shape.

Base and upstream syncing

The bera-v0.39.x line is branched from a tagged upstream release, the CometBFT v0.39.3 tag, which gives it a fixed and well-known starting point on the upstream v0.39.x line. It was created with:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft.git
git fetch upstream --tags
git checkout -b bera-v0.39.x v0.39.3

Future upstream releases are adopted by merging the release tag into bera-v0.39.x through a normal PR:

# fetch exactly this release tag, explicitly from upstream cometbft
git fetch upstream tag v0.39.4
# verify the local tag matches what upstream serves (the two SHAs must match)
git ls-remote upstream 'refs/tags/v0.39.4^{}'
git rev-parse 'v0.39.4^{commit}'
# start a sync branch from the current tip of bera-v0.39.x
git checkout -b sync-upstream-v0.39.4 origin/bera-v0.39.x
# merge the tag, recording its upstream origin in the commit message
git merge v0.39.4 -m "Merge upstream cometbft tag v0.39.4 into bera-v0.39.x"
# resolve conflicts, rebuild and test, then open a PR into bera-v0.39.x

Sync PRs must be merged with a merge commit, never squashed. Squashing breaks the shared ancestry with upstream, so every later sync re-conflicts on changes we already took. Merging rather than rebasing also keeps the branch append-only, so open PRs, clones, and go module consumers survive a sync, and each conflict is resolved once inside a reviewed PR.

The bera-specific changes stay easy to inspect. git diff v0.39.4 bera-v0.39.x shows everything we maintain on top of the latest upstream tag.

Urgent upstream fixes can be cherry-picked between releases, and the next sync merge supersedes them. The first such sync has already happened. bera-v0.39.x merged v0.39.4 in #61, which brought in the #5860 blocksync fix without any cherry-pick.

Testing

• The fork builds both with and without -tags bls12381.
• The test suite is at parity with the pristine upstream base, now v0.39.4 after Sync our bera-v0.39.x branch to receive the new upstream v0.39.4 tag #61. The one remaining flake reproduces on the pristine tag as well, so it is not a regression.
• Compatibility with bera-v1.x was verified out of tree. A one-time harness captured the exact bytes and hashes a bera-v1.x build produces and confirmed this port produces identical output, covering the vote and proposal sign bytes, the aggregated-commit hash and its proto encoding, the block header hash, the consensus params hash, the persisted state proto, and a full real aggregated commit. That harness is not part of this PR, so a committed vectors test could be added later to make it reproducible in CI.

New tests added by this PR:

• TestAggregateAndVerify aggregates BLS signatures and verifies the aggregate, including rejecting an invalid signature and a missing public key.
• TestReactorAggregatedCommits runs a full all-BLS validator network and confirms the aggregated commits it produces verify against the validator set.
• TestAggregationPBTSRejectsUntimelyProposal confirms that under PBTS a proposal whose timestamp is outside the timely window is prevoted nil.
• TestAggregationWALReplayRestart restarts a node through WAL replay and confirms it recovers a height that was committed with an aggregated commit.
• TestAggregationCatchUpViaAddCommit drives the catch-up path where a lagging node adopts an aggregated commit through AddCommit and advances, and checks that AddCommit rejects forged, wrong-block, and non-aggregated commits.
• TestPBTSProposerWaitTime, TestPBTSProposalIsTimely, and TestPBTSSynchronyParamsInRound unit-test the proposer wait, the timeliness check, and the per-round synchrony scaling.
• TestPBTSFarFutureProposalRejectedAtHighRound is the regression test for the removed round>10 timeliness bypass, ported from bera-v1.x chore(state): avoid 10 round check for timeliness #50. It drives 13 rounds of consensus against far-future proposals and asserts they are prevoted nil at every round, including rounds above 10. TestPBTSSynchronyParamsInRound additionally asserts the synchrony back-off caps at MaxMessageDelay at overflow-prone rounds.
• TestCommitMessageValidateBasic checks the MaxVotesCount cap on gossiped whole commits, at and above the cap.

[github-actions]

The latest Buf updates on your PR. Results from workflow Protobuf Lint / lint (pull_request).

Build	Format	Lint	Breaking	Updated (UTC)
✅ passed	✅ passed	✅ passed	✅ passed	Aug 14, 2026, 11:18 AM

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Re-forks Berachain’s CometBFT customizations onto v0.39.3 while preserving bera-v1.x consensus and persisted-state compatibility.

Changes:

• Ports PBTS, BLS commit aggregation, and whole-commit catch-up.
• Adds ADR-115 next-block delays and next-proposer ABCI data.
• Updates protobuf formats, validator encoding, remote signing, tests, and tooling.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 91 out of 93 changed files in this pull request and generated 6 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
.golangci.yml	Allows BLST imports.
CHANGELOG.md	Documents fork features and compatibility.
buf.gen.yaml	Maps protobuf wrappers for generation.
version/version.go	Sets Berachain fork version.
blocksync/reactor.go	Uses feature-based vote-extension settings.
blocksync/reactor_test.go	Updates blocksync fixtures for PBTS.
consensus/state.go	Integrates PBTS, aggregation, delays, and catch-up.
consensus/state_test.go	Adapts consensus state tests.
consensus/state_ingest.go	Uses feature parameters during ingestion.
consensus/state_ingest_test.go	Updates ingestion tests.
consensus/reactor.go	Gossips block-part hints and aggregated commits.
consensus/reactor_test.go	Updates reactor state expectations.
consensus/replay.go	Replays aggregated commit messages.
consensus/replay_test.go	Adapts proposal timestamps.
consensus/msgs.go	Converts new consensus messages.
consensus/msgs_test.go	Pins new message wire formats.
consensus/metrics.go	Defines PBTS and delay metrics.
consensus/metrics.gen.go	Generates metric implementations.
consensus/pbts_test.go	Tests PBTS timing behavior.
consensus/mempool_test.go	Passes proposal receive times.
consensus/invalid_test.go	Removes vote timestamps.
consensus/common_test.go	Updates shared proposal helpers.
consensus/byzantine_test.go	Adapts Byzantine scenarios.
consensus/aggregation_reactor_test.go	Tests BLS network commits.
consensus/aggregation_replay_test.go	Tests aggregated WAL recovery.
consensus/aggregation_pbts_test.go	Tests PBTS rejection with BLS.
consensus/aggregation_catchup_test.go	Tests whole-commit catch-up.
consensus/types/round_state.go	Supports commit-backed LastCommit.
consensus/types/peer_round_state.go	Tracks peer catch-up commits.
consensus/types/height_vote_set.go	Stores received aggregated commits.
crypto/bls12381/aggregation.go	Implements BLS aggregation.
crypto/bls12381/aggregation_none.go	Adds disabled-build stubs.
crypto/bls12381/aggregation_test.go	Tests aggregate verification.
crypto/bls12381/key.go	Updates disabled BLS API.
crypto/bls12381/key_bls12381.go	Adds compression and corrected aggregation types.
crypto/bls12381/const.go	Defines compressed key size.
crypto/encoding/codec.go	Supports pointer and compressed BLS keys.
evidence/pool_test.go	Updates encoded evidence size.
internal/test/commit.go	Uses feature parameters.
internal/test/config.go	Adds PBTS genesis parameters.
internal/test/params.go	Enables extensions through feature parameters.
node/setup.go	Shortens seed disconnect timing.
privval/file.go	Removes timestamp re-signing and adds raw signing.
privval/file_test.go	Updates timestamp signing tests.
privval/msgs.go	Wraps raw-signing messages.
privval/retry_signer_client.go	Retries raw signing.
privval/signer_client.go	Adds remote raw signing.
privval/signer_client_test.go	Tests remote raw signing.
privval/signer_requestHandler.go	Handles raw-signing requests.
proto/buf.yaml	Exempts intentional wire changes.
proto/tendermint/abci/types.proto	Adds delay and next proposer fields.
proto/tendermint/consensus/message.go	Wraps new consensus messages.
proto/tendermint/consensus/types.proto	Defines commit and block-part messages.
proto/tendermint/privval/types.proto	Defines raw-signing messages.
proto/tendermint/state/types.proto	Persists next-block delay.
proto/tendermint/types/canonical.proto	Removes signed vote timestamps.
proto/tendermint/types/canonical.pb.go	Regenerates canonical types.
proto/tendermint/types/params.proto	Adds feature and synchrony parameters.
proto/tendermint/types/validator.proto	Adds aggregation flags and key fields.
rpc/client/evidence_test.go	Uses committed PBTS block time.
state/execution.go	Applies ADR-115 and next proposer data.
state/execution_test.go	Updates execution expectations.
state/state.go	Persists delays and creates PBTS blocks.
state/validation.go	Validates PBTS block times.
state/validation_test.go	Updates block validation tests.
store/store_test.go	Adapts pruning tests for PBTS.
test/e2e/runner/setup.go	Writes feature-based genesis settings.
types/block.go	Adds aggregate flags and commit reader support.
types/block_test.go	Updates commit tests.
types/canonical.go	Excludes vote timestamps from sign bytes.
types/events.go	Adds block-part event.
types/evidence.go	Removes evidence vote timestamps.
types/params.go	Implements feature and synchrony parameters.
types/params_test.go	Tests new parameter representation.
types/priv_validator.go	Adds BLS mocks and raw signing.
types/proposal.go	Adds PBTS proposal timestamps and timeliness.
types/proposal_test.go	Updates proposal tests.
types/test_util.go	Removes vote timestamps from helpers.
types/time/time.go	Adds injectable clock source.
types/time/mocks/source.go	Provides generated clock mock.
types/validation.go	Verifies aggregated commits.
types/validator.go	Changes validator key serialization.
types/validator_set_test.go	Updates validator protobuf fixtures.
types/vote.go	Enforces zero vote timestamps.
types/vote_test.go	Updates signed-byte vectors.
types/vote_set.go	Creates aggregated BLS commits.
types/vote_set_test.go	Updates vote-set tests.

Files not reviewed (2)

• abci/types/types.pb.go: Generated file
• consensus/metrics.gen.go: Generated file

Suppressed comments (2)

consensus/state.go:1440

• This second aggregation path also runs when vote extensions are enabled, bypassing canAggregateCommits. That creates an aggregated extended commit which the restart and whole-commit catch-up paths cannot consume. Include !cs.isVoteExtensionsEnabled(lastCommitAsVs.GetHeight()) in canBeAggregated before calling MakeBLSCommit.

		if canBeAggregated {
			if !cs.isPBTSEnabled(cs.Height) {
				panic("Wanted to aggregate LastCommit, but PBTS is not enabled for height " + strconv.FormatInt(cs.Height, 10))
			}
			lastExtCommit = lastCommitAsVs.MakeBLSCommit()

consensus/state.go:1535

• Aggregation is selected even when vote extensions are enabled, despite the new catch-up path explicitly not supporting that combination. The resulting extended commit cannot be reconstructed after restart because its individual consensus signatures were cleared, and AddCommit refuses it. Gate aggregation on vote extensions being disabled.

func (cs *State) canAggregateCommits() bool {
	proposerKey := cs.Validators.GetProposer().PubKey
	_, blsKey := proposerKey.(*bls12381.PubKey)
	_, blsKey2 := proposerKey.(bls12381.PubKey)
	return (blsKey || blsKey2) && cs.Validators.AllKeysHaveSameType()

---

💡 Add a code-review agent skill or configure MCP servers for context-aware, tailored reviews. Learn more in the docs.