State of the Network

Growth in Stellar accounts for 2019.

Like Stellar’s identity, the network and the tools surrounding it have evolved quite a bit in 2019. We saw many SEPs and CAPs introduced/revised along with new SDKs, APIs, sidechain exploration, and educational content.

Stellar Core

This year the network upgraded from Stellar-Core version 10.2.0 to version 12.2.0 and continued to see steady growth along the way. The major protocol upgrades included some major network improvements that made Stellar faster, more efficient, and easier to build on. My favorites:

Another cool development that started in 2019 was Astrocore, a Rust implementation of Stellar-Core spearheaded by the Evil Martians team. Their goal is to not only rebuild Stellar-Core from the ground up, but to provide a fleshed-out specification along the way.

Horizon

This year we upgraded Horizon several times, from version 0.15.3 all the way to version 0.24.1. The biggest change: we introduced a new ingestion system that’s more consistent, customizable, and developer-friendly. It has a full copy of the ledger state built using history archives so it doesn’t tax Stellar-Core, which enables the creation of new features such as the “Accounts for Signer” endpoint and faster path finding.

The new ingestion engine is still experimental — it coexists alongside the old engine, and lives behind a feature flag — but we’ll be switching over to it soon, and publishing info about how to use it to build custom apps and services. In 2019, we hatched, reared, and fledged the new ingestion engine. In 2020, that bird’s gonna soar.

The Evil Martians team came through again this year and unveiled their GraphQL alternative to Horizon — Astrograph — which provides a new, flexible tool to access and build on the Stellar network.

To compliment Horizon, SDF also introduced a new ticker API to provide data about markets, issuers, and assets on the Stellar Network.

Sidechains

This year we started to see exploration into the world of sidechains. Sidechains and second layer solutions introduce scalability and privacy that aren’t otherwise available on the main network. The two projects that made their way in to the spotlight were ZkVM and Project Centaurus:

ZkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) aims to introduce a multi-asset blockchain architecture for scalable and confidential smart contracts. For additional info watch ZKVM: Fast, Confidential Smart Contracts & ZkVM — Oleg Andreev — CES Summit ’19. You can also find more ZkVM info on Github.

Project Centaurus aims to be a second layer payment network, exchange, and scaling solution for Stellar. It is spearheaded by OrbitLens, the creator of StellarExpert, and more information can be found on Github.

Decentralization

Another major focus this year was improving the decentralization of the network. At the start of the year the network was (unintentionally) too reliant on SDF’s validators, so several key ecosystem participants started working together to improve things by consciously distributing trust among reliable nodes. They succeeded.

Heading into 2020, we’re proud to say that the network is significantly more decentralized. It no longer relies on SDF’s nodes (nor does anyone want it to), and increased validator independence and network robustness are continuing trends. In 2020, we’ll continue to roll out more resources and tools for validators to make it easier for projects to spin up their own nodes and participate in the network in a meaningful way.

We also saw a ton of new research into and educational material about the Stellar Consensus Protocol in 2019. Some of my favorites:

You don’t have to have a deep understanding of how SCP works to build on Stellar, but it’s great to have some good reading material when you want to dive deep.

If you want to keep up with new developments in 2020 you can follow the Stellar Dev Digest (a weekly newsletter), follow / join the discussions on the developer mailing list, or follow the Stellar Developers Blog.