Stellar foundation advocates postponing Protocol 20 upgrade following the identification of a software flaw

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has announced a delay in the smart contract upgrade on the Stellar blockchain until the end of January due to the discovery of a bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0. In a blog post on January 27, the SDF explained that they have decided to disable their validators to support the postponement of the Protocol 20 vote on January 30 until after the bug is fixed. Although the foundation stated that the bug poses little risk, it could potentially affect various applications. The SDF assured that a solution is already being worked on and will be available within two weeks. However, they emphasized that the decision to upgrade the network ultimately lies with them, as non-SDF validators on Stellar can still choose to vote in favor of the Protocol 20 upgrade on January 30. Regardless of the outcome, the SDF will continue to address the bug and engage in discussions with other validators. A quorum is required by voting validators for the Protocol 20 upgrade to be approved, and there are currently 43 validator nodes as of December 2023. The bug occurs when a “Soroban” transaction request is made, resulting in a refund and fee-bump. However, under the current code, the refund is not sent to the fee-bump’s source account as intended. Soroban is a smart contract platform that was launched on a Stellar testnet in October 2022. In the same month, the SDF introduced a $100 million fund to attract developers to the platform. Tyler van der Hoeven, one of Stellar’s core developers, mentioned in a post on January 26 that Protocol 20 will be rolled out in phases, but did not specify the timeline for the full implementation of Soroban smart contracts on Stellar. Stellar is one of the oldest blockchain projects, primarily focused on payments and asset tokenization. The token powering the Stellar blockchain, XLM, currently has a market cap of $3.2 billion.