Animica 9.7.0 lands every pending mainnet fork in one coordinated step at height 75,000. The changes below had been defined in core/network_params.py but left unwired, so a live node still computed the old 85/15 split; 9.7.0 wires and tests them. All are grandfathered below 75,000 (and active from genesis on testnet/devnet), so no realized history changes.
Reward split (FORK_TREASURY_25 + FORK_SERVICE_CARVE). The treasury share rises from 15% to 25% inside compute_block_reward; the flag had pointed at 70,000 but was never read, and is moved to 75,000 so the whole split changes at once. A further 25% of every block is reserved for inference and withheld from the miner whether or not anything claims it. The unclaimed slice rolls to the foundation treasury, so a no-claim block is 50% miner / 50% treasury and a fully claimed block is 50% miner / 25% treasury / 25% inference. Emission total and the halving schedule are unchanged — only the division.
FORK_VALUE_CALL. TxCall gains an optional amount, omitted from the canonical object when zero so every historical valueless call encodes and hashes byte-identically; debit_credit_for_call moves it from caller to callee.
FORK_BOUNDED_RETARGET. A stall now eases difficulty by one bounded step and resets the EMA instead of teleporting Θ to the floor (the trapdoor that had wedged the chain); a floor escape lifts Θ off the floor when blocks are not slow.
FORK_FINALITY_DEPTH. The reorg bound is clamped into [MIN_REORG_DEPTH, FINALITY_DEPTH] per candidate, so no operator override can accept an arbitrarily deep rewrite or self-wedge by refusing every reorg. It never rejects a block, only declines to make a tip canonical.
FORK_QUANTUM_BEACON. Presence-gated binding to attested quantum randomness: a block carrying no beacon is valid at every height forever, so a QRNG outage cannot halt the chain; only a present commitment is verified.
Why this upgrade is mandatory. Coinbase amounts are never validated against the schedule, yet state application credits balances from the node’s own reward computation. An un-upgraded node does not fork or stall — it accepts identical blocks and credits different balances, silently and permanently. Every full node, pool and balance-tracking exchange or explorer must be on 9.7.0 before 75,000.
Two follow-ups after activation: 10.2.2 fixed a block template that over-advertised the miner’s share by 75 ANM, and 10.2.7 made settlement anchors constructible so the carve can reach providers.