- Stellar Development Foundation disarms validators amid identified bug concerns.
- SDF responds to ecosystem feedback, delays Protocol 20 upgrade vote.
- Quorum-dependent upgrade outcome; SDF commits to bug resolution.
In a recent announcement, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) revealed its decision to disarm validators, postponing the anticipated Protocol 20 upgrade vote on January 30. This move comes in response to feedback from various stakeholders within the Stellar ecosystem, including contract developers, wallet developers, validators, and tool builders.
On January 25, the SDF disclosed a bug discovered in Stellar Core v20.1.0, with potential implications for applications and services using fee bumps for Soroban transactions in the event of the Mainnet upgrading to Protocol 20. While SDF initially assessed the bug’s risk as low, considering the phased rollout plan and best practices implementation, community discussions prompted a reevaluation.
The SDF, emphasizing the collaborative nature of network upgrades, engaged the Stellar Dev Discord and developer mailing list to gather insights. The collective feedback led to the decision to disarm validators, prioritizing a broad consensus and preparedness for the significant protocol change.
With the SDF disarming its validators, other validators in the open-source community can still choose to vote for Protocol 20. If quorum is achieved, the upgrade will proceed. Alternatively, if validators choose to disarm and quorum is not met, the network will continue running Protocol 19 temporarily.
Validators looking to disarm can use the provided stellar-core command. Regardless of the outcome, the SDF commits to resolving the identified bug and engaging in discussions with validators. If the upgrade is postponed, coordination for a future vote will occur once a Stellar Core version containing the bug fix is released, expected within the next two weeks.
