Stellar Protocol (CAPs) and Ecosystem (SEPs) Updates

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.

Another week, another new CAP/SEP. I think that makes four weeks in a row… we are on 🔥!

CAP-0023 [DRAFT]: written by Jonathan Jove, CAP-0023 continues the trend of addressing failed transaction issues (see also David Mazieres’s CAP-0022) and roadblocks to safe, simple, payment channel implementations. Specifically, this CAP “introduces new operations that separate sending a payment from receiving the payment. Then the success of sending depends only on the state of the sending account and success of receiving depends only on the state of the receiving account.” This CAP introduces a new ledger entry, BalanceEntry , along with two new operations: CreateBalance and ClaimBalance . To get the low down on how all this works along with the rationale for this change, checkout the CAP in its entirety.

We also saw a CAP move from Draft →Accepted!

CAP-0015 [ACCEPTED]: CAP-0015, authored by OrbitLens, introduces the concept of the “Fee Bump Transaction” (BFE) to allow paying transaction fees by an arbitrary account. This is especially useful in cases where a third-party may want to cover the fees of a client (wallets/exchanges) or a pre-signed transaction, signed before a base_fee increase, needs to increase its fee to become valid again. Read the finer details here.

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