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 a new SEP titled Account Memo Requirements. The goal of this proposal is to provide a standard way to define transaction memo requirements for incoming payments.

Custodial exchanges tend to use a single Stellar wallet for deposits and withdrawals, and to rely on memos to differentiate users. This setup is great until a user forgets to input their unique memo and their deposit gets lost.

Recently, there was a proposal to tackle this problem by introducing multiplexed accounts, which I discussed at length in a previous dev digest. Adding muxed accounts requires a change to Stellar-core, so it may be a while before we see them live on the network. The Account Memo Requirements proposal is a temporary fix while we wait.

Here’s how it works: an account owner submits a transaction with MANAGE_DATA operation that adds a data entry with the name interop.memo_required and a value containing the expected memo type ( MEMO_TEXT , MEMO_ID , MEMO_HASH , or MEMO_RETURN ). SDK’s can then fetch a destination account’s information, perform checks, and throw an error if the transaction doesn’t meet the requirements.

It seems that a few people like the solution so far! What do you think? Join in on the discussion here.

Merged PRs

Because of the holidays, it’s been a while since I’ve written a proper Dev Digest. Here are all of the PRs that were merged while I was drinking egg nog: