Stellar Foundation Urges Delay of Protocol 20 Upgrade Due to Bug Discovery

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has announced that a smart contract upgrade on the Stellar blockchain will be postponed at the end of the month due to the discovery of a bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0. The bug, which was found by SDF on January 25, poses a small risk but could potentially impact various applications. Despite a fix being in progress and expected to be available within two weeks, SDF emphasized that it has the sole decision-making power to upgrade the network. Non-SDF validators on Stellar may still choose to vote in favor of the Protocol 20 upgrade on January 30. If the validators opt to postpone the upgrade, a future vote date will be determined once a new version of Stellar Core with the bug fix is released.

Regardless of the outcome, SDF will continue working to resolve the bug and engage in discussions with other validators. A quorum of voting validators is required for the Protocol 20 upgrade to pass. According to Stellarbeat.io, there were 43 validator nodes as of December 2023. The bug occurs when a “Soroban” transaction request is made but results in a refund and fee-bump without sending the refund to the fee-bump’s source account as intended by the current code, SDF explained in a GitHub post on January 25. Soroban is a smart contract platform that launched on a Stellar testnet in October 2022, and SDF launched a $100 million fund to attract developers to the platform in the same month.

Tyler van der Hoeven, one of Stellar’s core developers, mentioned in a post on January 26 that Protocol 20 will be implemented in phases, No timeline for the full implementation of Soroban smart contracts on Stellar was provided. Stellar, one of the oldest blockchain projects, primarily focuses on payments and asset tokenization. The market capitalization of XLM, the token powering the Stellar blockchain, is currently $3.2 billion.