High level summary
This week the Consensus team made progress on two fronts: the question of survivable eclipse duration, which is part of our work supporting Genesis delivery, and how to improve the handling of blocks from the future. Regarding the UTxO-HD branch, we managed to run a node with legacy blocks, which is syncing with mainnet, up to including Alonzo. We also investigated a regression in mempool snapshotting, which was ultimately solved by a Ledger update, and will be fixed in the upcoming Node 8.6 release.