Stellar Foundation developers have announced that the Protocol 20 upgrade, which was scheduled to take place this Tuesday, January 30, has been postponed.
The reason behind this decision was a bug discovered in the Stellar Core v20.1.0 version of the protocol, which may affect applications that are part of the Stellar ecosystem.
According to the developers, the detected bug did not represent a major threat to the network, but was rather a “low-risk” bug. This was after analyzing the possible impacts of the bug on the network and considering that the upgrade to Protocol 20 would be carried out in different phases. Even so, the validators have voted to postpone the upgrade until further notice, while the Stellar Foundation developers are working to fix the bug.
Protocol 20, Stellar's biggest update since launch
The upgrade known as Protocol 20 is, so far, the biggest upgrade to be released in this blockchain ecosystem. This major upgrade will introduce smart contract functionality to the Stellar network, which will elevate its utility and use cases in the blockchain ecosystem.
Through Protocol 20, Stellar developers will introduce native support for the Soroban smart contract programming language to the network, enabling developers and blockchain builders to deploy new protocols and decentralized applications (DApps) on the network.
The developers of the Stellar Foundation have been working in the Protocol 20 upgrade and, on Soroban, since the beginning of 2022, deploying the upgrade and the new smart contract platform multiple times on the Stellar, Futurenet and T testnets. In fact, on the first of these networks, the new upgrade was deployed 10 times, while on the second, 2 times. All of these deployments have served as a chance for developers to experiment, prototype, fine-tune details and provide feedback on the upgrade.
However, even though the upgrade has been two years in the making and the Foundation team has been preparing for its implementation later this month, validators have made the decision to postpone the vote that would activate Protocol 20 on the Stellar mainnet. It should be noted that the Stellar Foundation encouraged validators to postpone the vote following the “strong feedback and discussion” they received on the matter.
The Foundation explained in a statement that it opened several threads on the Stellar Dev Discord and on its developer mailing list, to obtain feedback from the general community of the network.
Although the Foundation said the error was not serious and did not represent a significant risk, it decided to listen to the community and stick to its decision. “We are not an ecosystem of one,” emphasized the organization, highlighting the importance of the principles that govern Web3.
On the way to becoming a more flexible and complete network
Soroban will provide Stellar developers with a smart contract platform, on which they can build new applications and accelerate the blockchain landscape.
As the Foundation emphasized, smart contracts will open up new possibilities for the network, supporting a broader set of functionalities and tools, which will provide this blockchain ecosystem with greater flexibility and utility.
Stellar, which launched publicly in 2014, has become one of the most important blockchain and cryptocurrency networks in the industry, ranking 26th among the most capitalized cryptocurrencies in the market. Currently, XLM, the native digital currency of the Stellar network, is trading at around $0,116 and maintains a market cap of almost $3.300 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Over the past year, XLM has seen remarkable growth, rising by more than 20%, while since its launch, the value of this cryptocurrency on the market has increased by 9.390%.
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