The Gridcoin Developers are pleased to unveil 3.7.12 to you today, which is a massive release featuring over 450 commits over the last couple months. While being a large update it is still leisure, and users do not have to update.

Download the update from GitHub here.

The Windows MSI can be downloaded here.

Rather than posting the full release notes (because that would be ridiculous given the number of changes), I will instead showcase some of the more prominent and exciting features in this release. If you would like the full unedited changelog please see the Github commit list here.

New changes in this release include:

Gridcoin Research is now a 64 bit installation

• This is largely due to the fact that our GUI management software has been updated to QT 5.9 and QT has dropped support for 32 bit operating systems. Note that this change was made by QT in June of last year, so this has been a long time coming. If you still require a 32 bit release, please do not use this leisure update and remain on 3.7.11.0 for the time being.
• Please note however that we will be removing support for 32 bit entirely with the next mandatory release (Date TBD). This serves as a warning for those still on 32 bit systems: you have a few months before you will need to find a 64 bit OS to run the wallet.

New UI

• We are pleased to share the new graphical user interface that has been in the development branch for over six months now. It's time for the new icons and artwork to be released to everyone. See below for a sample of the new GUI in default "light" mode:

• To break down the new icons on the right, we have at the top the purple beaker for a POR (solo) Researcher reward. Below that we can see two red icons denoting outgoing transactions (sent to another wallet). Beneath that we see an incoming transaction (in this case from grcpool). Finally at the bottom we see the icon for sending transactions to yourself.
• Also take note of the great new art for the icons on the lefthand side, with the new purple coloring throughout the wallet's UI.

RPC Overhaul

• The Gridcoin RPC commands have received a large overhaul to make them more consistent with commands used by other "Bitcoin-like" wallets. The most notably changes come in the form of removing the keywords execute and list from commands. Any command that used these prefixes previously, such as list rsa for example, will now be changed to run without the prefix. So the old command list rsa is now simply rsa in the new wallet.
• In addition many new RPC commands have been added, although many of these are used for internal debugging and logging purposes by testers and developers. For full RPC documentation please see the GitHub commits linked above.

New AutoTools Build System

• This item is mainly of interest to those who self-compile or manage packages themselves. Gridcoin has switched to the AutoTools build system which greatly simplifies the process of self-compiling the wallet across all platforms. If you self-compile or need information about AutoTools, please refer to the documentation in the /doc/ folder on GitHub.

Neural Network Enhancements

• With this update we introduce many improvements to the Neural Network used by Windows nodes that should improve consensus, decrease sync time, and generally make the entire process of creating superblocks smoother. As stated above the full changelog for the NN can be found in the GitHub commits.

These are far from all the changes, but these five are the ones we would like to specifically showcase for the average wallet user. We hope you will be happy with the new release and look forward to your feedback.

As always, thank you to all the developers who contributed to this release, including but not limited to: @ravonn, @ifoggz, @tomasbrod, @thecharlatan, and @jamescowens.

I would also like to thank all our dedicated testnet users who helped to find bugs and issues to ensure a smooth release. Special thanks to @noah-blaker, @jamescowens (again!), and @GlenArm for going the extra mile to assist debugging tricky last minute issues.