January 2025 monthly summary for hiero-ledger/hiero-json-rpc-relay driven by a focus on security, reliability, and maintainability. Delivered security enhancements and stability improvements in the Relay Service, with targeted hardening to prevent leakage of sensitive operator keys and robustness improvements for operator address handling within the HBAR rate-limiting flow. Also fixed multiple build/test issues to reduce toil and improve long-term maintainability. The work included a configuration refactor to simplify deployments and reduce misconfig drift (commit a2bfebd1f75f2e1d0c0771ad05fa1e94bb29825e).

December 2024 summary: Focused on onboarding simplification and policy-driven capacity across two repositories. Delivered two high-impact features and no major bug fixes reported in the period. Key outcomes: - Reduced setup friction by enabling long-term scheduling by default in hiero-local-node (scheduling.longTermEnabled = true), delivering out-of-the-box scheduling with commit 7ad0f45c8131ce5c43914819f316445316f14e28. - Introduced an OPERATOR tier for HBAR rate limiting in hiero-json-rpc-relay, including refactor of HbarLimitService to support operator spending plans, and updates to configuration, tests, and docs (commits 13d09e9c355e97566323d31684236c3effc16010 and d73c0ab225faa95fd163cd074de9ecedd9330e4d; docs updated in #3338). Business value: - Faster time-to-value for new deployments due to zero-configuration scheduling defaults. - Enhanced multi-tenant control and clarity around operator spending plans and tiered limits, improving governance and compliance.