Bor v2.6.2 is here, introducing a major new relay service, along with important observability and performance enhancements.

New Relay for Preconfirmations & Private Transactions
This release introduces a new relay architecture that acts as a middleware between users and block producers. This enables two powerful new transaction submission methods:

• Preconfirmations: Users can submit transactions to a relay and receive immediate feedback from block producers about likely inclusion. The status can be checked via the new eth_checkPreconfStatus RPC endpoint on the relay.
• Private Transactions: Transactions can be sent directly to block producers via a relay, bypassing the public mempool. This is enabled by the new eth_sendRawTransactionPrivate RPC endpoint and helps protect transactions from front-running.

Node operators can enable this functionality with the following new flags:
For Relays: --relay.enable-preconfs, --relay.enable-private-tx, --relay-bp-rpc-endpoints, --disable-tx-propagation
For Block Producers: --accept-preconf-tx, --accept-private-tx

Enhanced Block Production Metrics
To help diagnose performance issues and latency, new metrics have been added to track the block creation and write pipeline. Previously, delays between block sealing and broadcasting were difficult to pinpoint. Now, operators have detailed timing metrics for key stages, including:

• Witness encoding and database writes (chain/witness/encode, chain/witness/dbwrite)
• State commits (chain/state/commit)
• Total block write duration (worker/writeBlockAndSetHead)
• Latency from write completion to broadcast (eth/seal2broadcast)

Go Version Upgrade
Bor has been updated to use Go version 1.26.0. This change leverages Go's new, more efficient garbage collector, which can lead to performance improvements and reduced resource consumption for the node.