Updates to Stellar Protocol (CAPs) and Ecosystem (SEPs)

Core Advancement Proposals (CAP) and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEP) are a formal way of documenting proposed standards to improve various aspects of the Stellar Network. These function similar to EIPs and BIPs from the Ethereum and Bitcoin communities respectively. CAPs and SEPs represent the culmination of many discussions that often take place on the Stellar Developer Google Group.

Active Discussions

The hot topic on the dev mailing list this week was the proposal for adding protocol-level mulitplexed (aka muxed) accounts. In case you need a refresher:

Multiplexed accounts are aiming to solve two problems:

Users forget memo IDs, leading to increased support costs and/or

lost customer funds for custodial services.

lost customer funds for custodial services. Memos are per-transaction, not per operation or source, making it

impossible do to things like have one transaction with payments to

two different multiplexed accounts, or include a multiplexing

identifier in a source account so that funds can be

returned.

The idea is to solve these issues by replacing all sources and destinations of payments with a new MuxedAccount type. The MuxedAccount type can either be a Ed25519 key or a pair of an Ed25519 and an unsigned 64-bit integer id. The id is ignored by stellar-core, kind of like a per-AccountID memo ID.

We’ve heard from a lot of players in the ecosystem, including Lobstr, Stellarport, Ternio Blockcard, and Coinqvest, and we’d love to hear from you.

As SDF chief scientist David Mazieres puts it in the thread “The question on the table is whether we should accept CAP-0027, which already has an implementation.”

What do you think? Join in on the discussion here.

If these types of conversations interest you, consider joining the Stellar Developer mailing list!

Merged PRs

It’s been a relaxed week as only two PRs have been merged in relation to CAPs and SEPs: