# Medusa v2.6.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Medusa (https://medusajs.com)
- **Version:** v2.6.0
- **Released:** Mar 04, 2025
- **Impact Score:** 7/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Source flagged
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/medusajs/updates/v2.6.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Medusa v2.6.0. Source highlight: Authentication improvements

## Breaking Changes & Deprecations
- Breaking changes: this change is not backward compatible due to security considerations

## New Features
- Introduced finer control over cart refresh logic to ensure we don't perform unnecessary cart refreshes
- Operation: Add to cart
- Load: 5 carts, operations for each cart run in parallel; for each cart, we add 100 items sequentially
- Operation: Add to cart
- Load: 5 carts, operations for each cart run in parallel; for each cart, we add 100 items sequentially
- feat: add middleware and routes sorter

## Improvements
- In your client (e.g. Next.js storefront), move the token from query params to the authorization header
- Eliminated unnecessary module calls in cart workflows to ensure we don't create unused transactions and have redundant database communication
- Minimized redundant data fetching in cart workflows, ensuring that only the data that is needed for the operation is fetched
- Changed workflows to accept prefetched data instead of always fetching the data independently
- Replaced the Redis `del` operation with the non-blocking delete `unlink` to reduce the load on Redis
- Replaced inefficient soft and hard deletes by performing the operation in a single query instead of multiple

## Bug Fixes
- There was no clarity on the ordering in which routes and middleware were executed. With the new implementation, this has been fixed (more on ordering is discussed below).
- fix(types, medusa): remove fulfillment and payment status filters from validator + http types
- fix(types): Allow providing either vite@5 or vite@6 for the peer dependency
- fix(promotion): scope uniqueness index to non deleted promotions
- fix(core-flows): support 0 as a valid unit price for custom line items
- fix(core-flows): unsafe access to a variant property