# Medusa v2.8.5 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Medusa (https://medusajs.com)
- **Version:** v2.8.5
- **Released:** Jun 25, 2025
- **Impact Score:** 5/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Not verified
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/medusajs/updates/v2.8.5/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Medusa v2.8.5. Source highlight: Improved Product Imports

## New Features
- feat: wire up direct uploads with local file provider
- feat(promotion, dashboard, core-flows, cart, types, utils, medusa): tax inclusive promotions
- feat(dashboard,types): add credit lines + loyalty changes
- feat: Improve startup time by parallelizing module and link loading
- feat: Normalize payment method data and options when passed to Stripe
- feat(): Add support for jwt asymetric keys

## Improvements
- **Pre-processing**: In the pre-processing phase, we validate the contents of the entire file, check for typos, unknown columns, invalid data types, or missing values, and report errors as soon as you upload the file.
- **Importing**: Products are imported in the background (as it could be time-consuming with large product catalogs). Since the validations have already been performed during the pre-processing phase, the chances of failure during the import phase are rare. However, certain database constraints around duplicate data might result in a failure.
- Use S3 direct uploads instead of self-importing and storing huge CSV files on a Medusa server. For this, you must configure the S3 file provider in production.
- Read the CSV contents as a stream of chunks and process/validate 1000 rows at a time. As a result, we never read or process the entire CSV file in memory. From our tests, this led to a memory drop from 4GB to 500MB when processing a file with 62000 rows.

## Bug Fixes
- fix(dashboard, types): loyalty UI changes
- fix(workflow-sdk): Async/nested runAsStep propagation
- fix: update product import template
- fix(create-medusa-app): remove "Created admin user" message
- fix(promotion, types): non discountable items check
- fix: remote query types