Stellar Foundation Plans Smart Contract Upgrade

Stellar Foundation disarmed validators to delay Protocol 20 vote acknowledging a discovered bug on January 25.

In response to the discovery of a flaw in Stellar Core version 20.1.0, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has scheduled an upgrade of the smart contract capabilities on the Stellar blockchain by the end of the month.

Stellar Foundation explained in a blog post published on January 27 that they deci ded to disarm their validators to support the postponement of the Protocol 20 vote on January 30 until after a bug fix.

Although the foundation stated that the flaw, which Stellar Foundation discovered on January 25th, posed “little risk,” it was possible that it may affect several other applications. SDF is already working on a patch that is anticipated to be released within the next two weeks.

On the other hand, Stellar Foundation emphasized that it is the sole entity with the authority to decide whether or not to upgrade the network in its current state.

This is because non-SDF validators on Stellar can still vote in favor of the Protocol 20 upgrade on January 30. The Software Development Forum stated that regardless of the conclusion, they will continue to work towards resolving the bug and will also continue to engage in conversations with other validators through both public and private channels.

“If validators opt to postpone the upgrade, we will coordinate to determine a future vote date once a new version of Stellar Core that contains a bug fix is released.”

For the Protocol 20 update to be approved, a quorum of voting validators must be present, as stated by Stellar Foundation. The information provided by Stellarbeat.io indicates that, as of December 2023, there were 43 validator nodes.

If a “Soroban” transaction request is issued, but it results in a refund and is fee-bumped, the bug exists. According to an explanation provided by SDF in a post on GitHub on January 25, the present code does not transfer the reimbursement to the source account of the fee bump as it should.

Soroban, a smart contract platform became operational on a testnet dedicated to Stellar in October 2022. In the same month, SDF also established a fund with one hundred million dollars to entice developers to join the platform.

Tyler van der Hoeven, one of the primary developers of Stellar, mentioned in a post on January 26 that Protocol 20 will be a “phased rollout.”

However, he did not specify how long it would take to fully implement Soroban smart contracts on Stellar. Stellar primarily focuses on tokenizing assets and payments, which contributes to its status as one of the oldest blockchain initiatives.

At the moment, the market capitalization of XLM, the currency that is responsible for powering the Stellar blockchain, is $3.2 billion.