The widely awaited Stellar blockchain update, which was supposed to include Ethereum-style smart contracts, may be delayed as a result of a glitch that caused the project’s developers and validators to reevaluate their original goal of January 30.
According to a draft blog post on Saturday, the Stellar Development Foundation, which oversees the blockchain’s ecosystem, discovered a problem in the Stellar Core v20.1.0 software on January 25. After the update is completed, the flaw can potentially impact services and apps on the new “Soroban” smart-contracts transactions.
The document states that although SDF officials “decided that the bug posed little risk given the phased rollout plan,” the foundation is now intending to “disarm” its own validators in order to stop them from voting to upgrade the network on January 30 in response to “robust feedback” from the developer community.
The post stated that other validators might yet decide to proceed with the “Protocol 20” upgrade.
In any event, the bug should be fixed in the next two weeks, and in the event that the upgrade is delayed, the foundation will “coordinate to determine a future vote date.”
As a 2014 fork of the Ripple protocol, Stellar is one of the first blockchains; it is currently undergoing an upgrade to include the programmability that Ethereum and its “smart contracts” are renowned for. Traders might be wondering if the project’s native XLM tokens would get more traction as a result of the makeover.