The Stellar Development Foundation, after receiving substantial feedback from the blockchain developer community, is recommending a postponement of the scheduled January 30th upgrade. This decision follows the January 25th discovery of a bug in the upgraded software, which, although considered to pose minimal risk, has prompted a more cautious approach to ensure the stability and security of the platform.
The anticipated upgrade of the Stellar blockchain to incorporate Ethereum-style smart contracts is expected to be postponed. This comes after the discovery of a bug, leading developers and validators involved in the project to reevaluate the initial target date of January 30th for the upgrade’s implementation.
According to a draft blog post shared with CoinDesk on Saturday, the Stellar Development Foundation, responsible for supporting the blockchain’s ecosystem, detected a bug in the Stellar Core v20.1.0 software on January 25. This bug has the potential to impact applications and services using the new “Soroban” smart-contracts transactions once the planned upgrade is implemented.
According to the post, officials at the Stellar Development Foundation initially assessed that the bug posed minimal risk, considering the phased rollout plan for the upgrade. However, following substantial feedback from the developer community, the foundation has decided to take a more cautious approach. They are now planning to “disarm” their own validators, preventing them from voting to proceed with the network upgrade on January 30th.
According to the post, despite the Stellar Development Foundation’s decision to disarm their validators, other validators on the network could still opt to proceed with the “Protocol 20” upgrade. However, an SDF representative, in an email to CoinDesk on Sunday, revealed that six out of seven tier-1 validators had expressed intentions to disarm as well. This includes not only the SDF, but also major players like Satoshipay, Blockdaemon, Public Node, Lobstr, and Whalestack, indicating a broader consensus among key network participants to delay the upgrade.
As per the representative, with the existing configurations, the upgrade won’t have adequate quorum for acceptance if fewer than five organizations vote in favor. In essence, it seems the upgrade is poised for postponement due to the anticipated lack of sufficient support.
The foundation anticipates a fix for the bug within the next two weeks. In case the upgrade is postponed, they plan to coordinate to establish a future vote date for the network upgrade.
Being one of the earliest blockchains, Stellar originated as a fork of the Ripple protocol in 2014. The current upgrade aims to introduce programmability, akin to Ethereum’s renowned “smart contracts.” Traders might be speculating on whether this enhancement could inject renewed vitality into the project’s native XLM tokens.
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