Advertisement
Stellar Delays Smart Contract Upgrade, Assures Bug Poses ‘Little Risk’
- Developers found a minor bug in Stellar’s smart contract update code.
- The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) believes delaying the vote on smart contract activation until the bug is fixed is the right move.
- Some in the community are optimistic that the bug will be resolved within just a couple of weeks, preventing a major delay.
- The addition of smart contracts to Stellar’s blockchain has the potential to rejuvenate the long-running crypto project.
Stellar (XLM)’s entrance into the smart contract game is set to see a minor delay, after developers uncovered a minor bug over the weekend. The original plan was for Stellar’s blockchain validators to vote on a proposal Jan. 30 that would determine whether smart contracts would go live or not. However, the changing conditions mean that Stellar’s underlying not-for-profit, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), wants to push the vote back until the bug is resolved.
Bug Should Be Fixed in Two Weeks
Things in the crypto sphere don’t tend to move very quickly. Perhaps the industry’s most anticipated blockchain upgrade in recent memory – Ethereum’s move to a proof-of-stake model – was plagued with setbacks. However, Stellar’s developers are bullish that they can find a solution to the bug within just a couple of weeks, when they can send the Protocol 20 upgrade (for smart contracts) back to a vote.
Because Stellar is a decentralised system, just the SDF deciding to delay their vote wouldn’t be enough to prevent other validators from participating if they desired. While concern over the bug is minimal, the SDF received “robust feedback and discussions regarding this choice” which ultimately caused them to “change [their] approach”. Upon communication with other major validators on the blockchain, six of the seven agreed with pushing back the vote and were planning to “disarm” their votes.
Given current configurations, if less than five organizations vote for the upgrade, it won’t have sufficient quorum to be accepted. In other words, it appears that the upgrade will be postponed”
Stellar Development Foundation
Stellar, originally Stellar Lumens, is one of the crypto industry’s longest-running projects, having been created as a fork of XRP way back in 2014. The cryptocurrency has been fairly static for quite some time, with its last all-time high coming in 2017. However, the addition of smart contracts will inject an extra layer of utility to the Stellar blockchain and provide holders with an array of new possibilities.
Author
Ben Knight
Ben Knight is a writer and editor from Melbourne with a passion for all things music and finance. He enjoys turning complex topics – especially the technical details of cryptocurrency – into digestible bites that anybody can understand. He acquired his Master’s in Writing, Editing and Publishing from RMIT in 2019 and has run his own creative writing business ever since.
