Stellar Delays Smart Contract Upgrade Due to Bug Discovery

According to last week’s announcement, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) – the organization behind the Stellar blockchain development – discovered a vulnerability in the Stellar Core software v20.1.0 on January 25th. In theory, this flaw could impact applications and services on the new “Soroban” smart contract transactions post-upgrade.

Based on ecosystem feedback, we’ve decided to disarm our validators in support of postponing the Protocol 20 vote on Jan. 30 until after a bug fix – which is already in the works – is available.

Read more about our decision below. https://t.co/b0hXJqlqem

— Stellar (@StellarOrg) January 27, 2024

While SDF believes the vulnerability appears to be low-risk, following strong feedback from the developer community, Stellar plans to reschedule the network upgrade after January 30th. A representative from the Stellar Development Foundation stated:

With the current situation, if less than 5 organizations vote for the upgrade, it seems that the upgrade will be postponed.

The platform will proceed to patch the bug in the next two weeks. In the event of a rescheduled upgrade, SDF will conduct a vote again for the deployment timeframe in the future.

Stellar is one of the oldest blockchains, known as a fork of Ripple in 2014. The project is currently undergoing upgrades to add programming capabilities and smart contracts similar to Ethereum.

This upgrade is also expected to bring a new look to Stellar’s native token, XLM.

Related: Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM): What’s The Difference?

Chart of XLM

The 1-week chart of the XLM/USDT pair on Tradingview at 08:08 AM on January 29, 2024.