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Animica 9.6.0: on-chain contract execution (FORK_VM_EXEC at 75,000)

Aug 10, 2026

Animica 9.6.0 wires real on-chain execution of the Python-VM contract CALL path — the token launcher and DEX included — behind FORK_VM_EXEC, gated at mainnet height 75,000 (0 on testnet and devnet).

Since 6.0.0 the raw-exec() contract path had been fail-closed: a call reverted. 9.6.0 replaces that stub with an interpreter that is safe by construction rather than by an ANIMICA_VM_ALLOW_UNSAFE_EXEC escape hatch.

  • vm_py/runtime/tree_engine.py is a deterministic, gas-metered tree-walking interpreter over the compiler’s structured IR. It supports arbitrary-precision integers (the DEX price math overflows 2^256, and masking would corrupt it), polymorphic + and bytes concatenation, bytes comparisons, short-circuit boolean operators, user-function calls with a shared gas meter and a depth cap, the stdlib builtins, int.from_bytes/to_bytes/bit_length, and stdlib dispatch through a bound host surface. There is no import, exec, eval or attribute escape, so a hostile contract can only revert, run out of gas, or touch its own namespaced storage.
  • vm_py/runtime/exec_validate.py is a closed-subset gate (source and AST bounds; rejects **, comprehensions and non-stdlib imports) for early rejection and denial-of-service protection on top of the interpreter’s structural safety.
  • execution/runtime/contracts.py now compiles (validate and lower, cached by code hash) and runs on the tree engine with state-backed storage and treasury hosts, so native-ANM legs settle; one gas meter is shared across a whole inter-contract call tree.

Activation semantics. Below 75,000 a CALL reverts exactly as it always has, so history is byte-identical and activation is state-safe. Read-only simulate_call is ungated, as an RPC query. Because the rule changes state from H, every node must run ≥ 9.6.0 (or set ANIMICA_FORK_VM_EXEC_HEIGHT) before the height or it will compute a divergent state.

Proven before ship. The existing token + DEX integration test — deploy, init, create pair, approve, add liquidity, swap — passes without the unsafe flag; the full token lifecycle, bignum math beyond 2^256, and determinism across hash seeds were verified.

9.6.1 (2026-08-11) followed with animica up serving ENA on any GPU, decoupled from training-pool status. The companion reward-split forks at the same height shipped in 9.7.0.