The upgrade supports the project’s broader 2026 goals, including leading private DeFi growth, launching Node V2, and shifting Treasury governance to the community.
COTI has finalized its long-planned Helium mainnet upgrade, which occurred on January 11, introducing a range of enhancements aimed at expanding support for confidential computation and high-performance private finance. The upgrade was executed as a protocol-level hard fork at block 5,098,638. During the upgrade, it required no user action, and network operations continued without any disruption.
The Helium release introduced COTI v1.2.0, which brings improvements to confidential logic, arithmetic performance, and developer tools. The project confirmed that its new stack enables native 128-bit and 256-bit arithmetic, allowing broader private use cases to run more reliably. This supports more complex decentralized finance protocols, real-world asset flows, and other enterprise applications that depend on privacy.
The upgrade also refined multiplication and division circuit functions, aiming to enhance speed and accuracy in multi-party computation (MPC). The release further adjusted MPC pricing parameters to align with the new performance capabilities.
A trace/debugging feature has also been introduced for developers working with confidential operations. While disabled by default, it allows teams to inspect private execution paths during development or testing. The network also fixed an issue with proxy contract compatibility by adjusting how nesting levels are checked during cipher text validation.
This move has not been out of the blue; COTI has been busy since last year, having also been part of the Africa Tokenization Council. As we earlier reported, it was formed to promote blockchain and AI adoption across Africa and the Middle East.
COTI has positioned Helium as a building block in its larger roadmap for 2026. The network aims to become the backbone of private DeFi, noting that PriveX reached $400 million in daily DEX volume in 2025. With live AI agents and rising user demand, it expects this volume to grow further in 2026. Moreover, the network is working with Bancor and PriveX to deliver a compliant privacy layer across decentralized finance.
Brad (SHIP), a community member, has broken the silence, noting:
Today we undertake the Helium Hardfork on COTI Mainnet… True end-to-end, on-chain, private operations at negligible cost for 128 & 256 bits.
As we previously outlined, the project also plans to upgrade its Treasury model later in 2026 as Node V2 goes live. The new system will promote decentralized governance while encouraging staking participation and reducing circulating supply. According to the foundation, this change is designed to improve user experience and better align incentives across the network.
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