Animica 8.0.1 follows 8.0.0 (the same day: ANM-native marketplace, generative media job types served by miners, ENA checkpoint distribution, the .anm registry and gateway, and a file-toggleable shadow for state-root observability) with a decentralized VPN and one gated consensus change.
Client. animica vpn exits | up | status | doctor | down. A real WireGuard tunnel (kernel wg-quick, boringtun/wireguard-go fallback) with a fail-closed killswitch. doctor is a leak self-test that gates the “connected” claim: handshake live, apparent IP changed, no IPv6 leak, killswitch present.
Exit operator. animica vpn exit register | serve, off by default and opt-in behind a wallet-signed terms acceptance. The exit installs an isolated nftables table that masquerades the tunnel subnet and blocks LAN, loopback, link-local, cloud-metadata and abuse ports without touching the host or Docker firewall. Byte accounting is signed on both sides; the registry reconciles client and exit counts and flags a divergence above 10%.
Browser proxy. Extension v1.2.0 adds a VPN tab that routes just that browser through a chosen exit via chrome.proxy. It is labelled honestly: a single-hop browser proxy, not a system VPN and not Tor. animica.dev/browser is a zero-install .anm gateway.
FORK_VPN_RELAY_REWARDS at mainnet block 50,000 — shipped inert. When live, a capped slice of each block’s subsidy is paid from the coinbase to relay operators, carved from the miner’s share: never more than 50 ANM per block, with the cap decaying with the halving, and emission-conserving. In 8.0.1 the on-chain distribution source returns empty, so at and after 50,000 the block reward is byte-identical to no-fork — verified by three independent adversarial reviews (mint, split, inertness) and a runtime stress test. Going live required sealing a relay-contribution root behind a fresh activation; until then dVPN rewards were off-chain IOUs with no spendable balance. The same fork key was realized as FORK_IOU_SETTLEMENT in 9.0.0.
The release is non-mandatory for consensus but recommended so nodes carry the dVPN and reward code ahead of block 50,000. 8.0.2, also on 2026-07-14, added a pinned checkpoint at 44,854 to un-wedge nodes stuck on the losing side of a natural one-block fork.