Hyperledger Besu vs Firefly III

Besu cuts a release candidate roughly monthly, and the feed titles each one after whatever commit sat at the head — which means 26.7.0-RC1 and 26.6.1-RC1 are presented to readers as changelog preparation rather than as releases. The candidates with substantive head commits show where the engineering attention is: bounding precompile result caches with a uniform memory ceiling, and fixing a snap-sync probe that treated an empty response as proof a range was fully covered.

The visible work is client resource discipline and sync correctness — the unglamorous half of running an execution client, where a cache without a byte ceiling becomes an operator's memory incident and a sync helper that short-circuits leaves silently missing state. Both fixes are the kind found by reasoning about edge cases rather than by feature planning. The release process itself is the other story: an Unreleased section had to be folded back into 26.5.0 because RC2 was cut from the head of main, which is a process seam rather than a code change.

The monthly release-candidate rhythm should continue; based on these entries the substantive changes will keep landing in sync correctness and memory bounding rather than in new operator-facing features.