Stellar Core Set to Switch Over to Version 10.0.0 By Early September

Stellar has seen plenty of good news over the last few months with the announcements of major partnerships—and the development team is keeping up this momentum by updating and improving the core Stellar protocol. The Stellar Foundation announced the upgrade on Twitter and Reddit on August 14, complete with instructions for those running nodes or developing on the Stellar network.

Sometime in the next month, the testnet will switch over to the new code, and after working out any bugs, version 10.0.0 will go live on the mainnet. The testnet is already running the update at the time of writing, with the mainnet expected to make the transition in late August or early September.  

Major Changes

According to the Stellar team, the new version will introduce major changes in the way the order book works.

The changes to the Stellar protocol are big enough that the switch will necessitate a hard fork, but all of the changes are agreed upon by the Stellar community, so the transition is expected to go smoothly. Anyone running a validating node will be required to vote on the changes, so validators are being asked to keep up-to-date with all updates as any bugs are worked out during the transition.

This is important news for developers working with Stellar. It will require a bit of legwork—for example, Horizon, the Stellar API which helps applications to interact with the Stellar network, will have to be upgraded at least to version 14 to be compatible with the new code.

If you just hold Stellar or use it to try out new apps and services, don’t worry—there’s no need to do anything. The upgrades of wallets and applications will be handled by the developers.

Issues related to the transition can be discussed on Stellar’s Stack Exchange.

Introduction of BumpSequence

The most anticipated change of the update is the implementation of the BumpSequence command.

Originally proposed last year, BumpSequence allows invalidating a number of transactions that have been issued but have not yet been processed by the network, by skipping forward to a specified transaction in the list. What this effectively means is that a number of transactions can be made conditional on some external event, adding another layer of smart contract logic to Stellar.

Increasing Flexibility of Operations

This move is consistent with Stellar’s overall design philosophy, which is somewhat unique in the crypto space for its emphasis on functionality and the relative absence of hype. Although Stellar is intended to function mainly as a network for the transfer of value, with upgrades of this kind, the types of business operations that can be executed on the network are gradually expanding.

It will be interesting to watch in the coming months how projects working with Stellar utilize the new features, and what kind of effect the changes will have on the overall direction of the Stellar ecosystem.

Related: Top 6 Mainnet Launches Coming Up in Q3 and Q4 2018