Releases and Updates

Stellar-core v12.3.0 was released on Thursday, January 30th. I’m going to be completely honest, a lot of the changes go way over my head, but there are some cool improvements and features worth highlighting.

I briefly mentioned it in a previous issue, but this release includes a network topology survey that allows validators to perform analysis on the overall network’s connectivity graph. Knowing more about the network’s topology will allow deeper changes to be made to the P2P networking code. A survey script was also added to illustrate how to use the survey code.

An interesting stability improvement is the removal of the accountbalances index on the account database. When inflation was around, only accounts with balances over 100 XLM were eligible to receive inflation. Stellar-core indexed those accounts to support running the inflation operation at low latency, but since validators voted to remove inflation, there’s really no point to continuing to do that. It’s just extra work. After removing the index, a full replay of the history of the network should take a little less time.

If Stellar-core is your thing, the full list of new features and improvements can be found here!