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.

SEP-0024 [DRAFT]: if you’ve been an avid reader of the digest over the past few weeks, you may have noticed a lot of tweaks to SEP-0006 as various anchors across the network began implementing this SEP, and ran into complications with some of its details. Over the course of these changes, implementors have become confused, and previously complete implementations have become no longer compliant. Thus, msfeldstein has proposed SEP-0024, a cleaned-up version of SEP-0006 that leaves all the non-interactive stuff behind. If you are curious about the differences between SEP-0024 and SEP-0006, I recommend reading the PR, as msfeldstein has a wonderful list of the diffs.

Other highlights from the week include a PR by jonjove, updating CAP-0015 such that it matches the in-progress implementation from stellar/stellar-core#2258. If you are looking forward to fee-bump transactions, as I am, I would recommend giving these changes a look. jonjove expands upon the details of the previous CAP, giving us a better insight into the technical details of implementing this new form of transaction. Really interesting stuff!

All-in-all, three pull requests were merged in the last week.

Updates to Stellar Core

Another BIG week on the stellar-core front as protocol version 12 landed! Congrats to the core team and the ecosystem as a whole! Protocol 12 is jam packed with new features. I recommend you give the full release notes a read, but for those short on time, here are the highlights:

Some node status monitoring improvements such as: quorum summary on info endpoint now utilizes last SCP round and peers endpoint shows connection duration

Symmetrical path payments

Removed bucket shadows

Disabled inflation

Wait… disabled inflation?!? Hold on a moment here and please take a quick second to re-read the following blog post. TL&DR until the network votes to accept protocol 12, these changes won’t be active on the network, and if protocol 12 is rejected, no sweat, SDF will release protocol 13 for vote (protocol 12 sans disabled inflation). So much voting… I know! It’s almost like this is a decentralized network or something.

Overall, seven pull requests were merged in the last week.