TL;DR
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The Stellar Foundation has disarmed its validators and voted to delay the Protocol 20 upgrade.
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The upgrade is set to be delayed due to the presence of a bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0.
Stellar Foundation Support Protocol Upgrade Delay
The Stellar Foundation, the development team behind the Stellar blockchain, announced via a blog post on Saturday that it has voted to postpone its smart contracts upgrade.
According to the foundation, they decided to disarm the network validators to prevent them from voting to upgrade the network to Protocol 20 on January 30. The upgrade was delayed due to the presence of a bug in the network. The Stellar Foundation wrote that,
“On January 25, 2024, we notified the ecosystem of a bug that was discovered in Stellar Core v20.1.0 that could impact applications and services that use fee bumps for Soroban transactions if or when the Mainnet upgrades to Protocol 20. We noted that we (the ecosystem and particularly network validators) had a choice to continue with the Protocol 20 upgrade vote on January 30 or to delay it. We at SDF spent time with the bug, saw its potential impacts and decided that the bug posed little risk given the phased rollout plan along with the implementation of best practices. But we are not an ecosystem of one.”
The team said other validators could still choose to push ahead with the "Protocol 20" upgrade. However, while speaking to Coinbase, an SDF representative revealed that six of seven tier-1 validators had now communicated plans to disarm. These validators are; SDF, Satoshipay, Blockdaemon, Public Node, Lobstr and Whalestack.
A fix for the bug is set to be available within two weeks. If the upgrade is delayed, the Stellar Foundation will coordinate and determine a future vote date. XLM, Stellar’s native coin, is down by 2% in the last 24 hours and is now trading at $0.114.