• Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announces changes in its upcoming update and will skip to Protocol 15.
• Protocol 14 had bugs that would have caused validators to crash.
  
• SDF urges the installation of a new version of Stellar Core (v15.0.0).

The Stellar Development Foundation has released an extremely important update for users of the Stellar Lumens public blockchain. According to the release, the update that was scheduled to implement Stellar Protocol 14 will be skipped. The SDF found critical bugs in this update, after the deployment of Protocol 14 in the testnet at the end of September. Therefore, the vote for the network update has been moved to Monday, November 23, 2020 at 1600 UTC.

After finding a solution for the bugs, the Stellar Development Foundation deployed them to the testnet. The solution was deployed on October 20th of this year as Protocol 15. This step was taken to avoid confusion and to verify that all validators are running the updated version of the Stellar Core. The SDF stated:

This discovery is exactly the kind of thing the testnet is designed to bring to light: long before we suggest a change to the public network, we thoroughly test it in a sandbox environment, and leave plenty of time to root out and correct potential problems so they never go live in a production environment.

New plans in Stellar Lumens’ update

The new features already announced for Stellar will be implemented with the deployment of Protocol 15 on the mainnet on November 23, 2020. The SDF has requested the cooperation of users and urged them to upgrade to v15.0.0 of the Stellar Core and v1.10.1 for Horizon users. These are the versions of Protocol 15.

The SDF states that these versions are “backward compatible” and will continue to support the current version of the Stellar protocol. At the same time, users should consider the following:

If you use a Stellar SDK and have already installed a Protocol-14-supporting version, you should be fine: this update doesn’t require changes at the SDK level.  If you haven’t, please do so as soon as possible. 

In a separate release, the two new features that Protocol 15 will bring to Stellar Lumens are revealed. The first is called Claimable Balances and the second is called Sponsored Reserves. Once the update is deployed, these new features will allow applications and services using Stellar to “become more attractive to a broader audience”. The Stellar Development Foundation adds:

After the upgrade, developers can create simpler, better user experiences that abstract away the complexity of blockchain, and do it without losing any of the advantages of a fast, cheap, and permissionless public ledger.

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