February 2026 (2026-02) summary for axelarnetwork/axelar-core focused on backward compatibility, stability, and simplification of cross-chain interactions. Delivered a critical compatibility bug fix for RotateKeyRequest to support historical transactions with binary sender fields and prevent UTF-8 validation errors, and completed a major cross-chain messaging overhaul that removes the link-deposit protocol, streamlining interaction flows and reducing complexity. Enhanced codec support to maintain backward compatibility with legacy formats, improving long-term maintainability and integration reliability.

Monthly summary for 2026-01: Axelar Core development focused on increasing reliability and interoperability by delivering backward compatibility improvements for historical transactions and nested batch messages in the axelar-core repository. The work addresses historical transactions with deprecated fields and UTF-8 validation errors, introduces a codec wrapper to correctly manage signers for messages with both new and deprecated sender fields, and relaxes the MaxUnpackAnySubCalls limit to support batch transactions with multiple nested messages. These changes reduce transaction failures, improve Rosetta API compatibility, and enable smoother migrations and audits. Committed change: db953b60a09af9f6fe6f9b2a40552b6388c1a143 (fix(rosetta): handle historical transactions with deprecated fields and UTF-8 issues #2325).

December 2025 monthly summary: Focused on strengthening release readiness, reliability, and test stability for axelar-core through targeted feature work, bug fixes, and cross-team collaboration. Delivered release-branch checks, enhanced Vald reward logic with heartbeat improvements, and improved release notes/testing stability, resulting in reduced release risk and more dependable validator rewards.

2025-11 monthly summary for axelar-core focused on security hardening, reliability, and operational agility. Delivered key platform enhancements, bug fixes, and testing coverage to stabilize cross-chain processing and accelerate secure deployments. The work improves cross-chain reliability, governance agility, and developer experience while strengthening security posture and deployment readiness.

For 2025-04, delivered two key items in axelar-amplifier focused on reliability, compliance, and governance. Implemented enhanced error handling for multisig with error-stack integration; standardized licensing across the repository to MIT/Apache-2.0, improving license compliance and downstream tooling compatibility. No major bugs reported in scope this month. These changes position the project for easier maintenance, faster debugging, and safer distribution.

February 2025 (2025-02): Modernized the CI/CD toolchain for axelar-amplifier by upgrading the Rust compiler to 1.81.0 across GitHub Actions workflows, cosmwasm optimizer image, and itertools dependency. This upgrade improves compatibility, stability, and access to the latest language features, reducing maintenance risk and enabling faster release cycles. No major bugs were reported this month; CI/CD pipelines were validated with the new toolchain to ensure reliable builds and deployments.

December 2024: Implemented targeted test hygiene improvement in the axelar-amplifier repository. Removed a debugging println from the multisig contract client tests, reducing noise in test output and CI logs without altering any functionality. This change lays groundwork for more reliable test runs and clearer failure signals, contributing to faster debugging and maintainability.

November 2024 focused on upgrade readiness and documentation quality for axelar-amplifier. Completed cross-repo coordination to prepare axelar-gateway for a future major upgrade and fixed a doc typo to improve clarity. These changes position the project for a controlled upgrade path and improved maintainability while preserving release discipline.