Stellar's Big Protocol 28 Upgrade Set For Testnet And Mainnet

What Is Protocol 28 Adapter?

Stellar is rolling out Protocol 28, codenamed Adapter, its next major network upgrade. The upgrade follows a fixed schedule. A stable Stellar Core release became available on August 13, with additional infrastructure and SDK releases following through August 21. The testnet upgrade vote is set for August 27 at 1700 UTC. The mainnet upgrade vote follows on September 16 at 1700 UTC. SDK users are advised to update their tooling before each respective deadline.

Two of the three changes bundled in Adapter, CAP-85 and CAP-86, are aimed at making Soroban smart contracts easier to build, upgrade, and scale. The third, CAP-83, strengthens the consensus layer that everything else rests on.

Breaking Down the Three Changes

CAP-83: This change lets validators begin voting before the transaction set has fully arrived, and gives them a clean, explicit way to drop a transaction set that is late or invalid instead of stalling. In practice, that means consensus keeps moving even when transaction data is slow to propagate, improving throughput and helping the network run smoothly at scale and at low cost. The full performance gains will be phased in after mainnet as parallel transaction-set downloading is gradually enabled.

CAP-85: This change will allow multiple contracts that share code to be upgraded together, making upgrades atomic and reducing the number of contracts developers need to deploy.

CAP-86: This change introduces new sparse map functions to make contract data migrations easier, allowing contract data to evolve without breaking existing functionality.

Taken together, the three changes continue a steady theme in recent Stellar protocol upgrades: making the network a more capable and developer-friendly platform for financial applications, without compromising the speed and low cost it is known for.

Sources:
Stellar Foundation: Introducing Adapter, Protocol 28 on Stellar
Stellar Docs: Software Versions and Protocol History