XLM Price Remains Steady Despite Stellar Delaying Protocol 20 Upgrade

Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced that the Protocol 20 upgrade will be delayed. Stellar said the decision comes after input from developers and other stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Therefore,SDF has chosen to “disarm” its validators, halting their ability to vote for the upgrade initially scheduled for January 30.

In a post on Saturday, Stellar emphasized a wide-ranging consensus for the crucial upgrade with Protocol 20. SDF said it wants to ensure all parties are adequately prepared.

A bug led to the delay

Notably, on January 25, SDF alerted the community about a bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0. This bug potentially affects applications and services using fee bumps for Soroban transactions following the upgrade to Protocol 20.

Despite SDF’s assessment that the bug poses minimal risk, it sought input on how to proceed. Eventually leading to the decision to delay the upgrade.

Stellar noted in the post, “Upgrading the network is not something SDF does alone, and to inform the decision about whether to move forward given the bug, we opened threads on the Stellar Dev Discord and our developer mailing list, and encouraged the ecosystem to weigh in.”

Now, the decision around Protocol 20 lies in the hands of the validators as an open-source community, SDF noted. They face two primary choices: proceed with the upgrade if a quorum is reached, or maintain the current Protocol 19 if a quorum is not achieved.

XLM price holds stable

Validators who wish to disarm their voting capabilities can reportedly do so using a specific command in stellar-core.

Amid this, the market response appears muted. Stellar native XLM is trading at $0.1159 at press time. It experienced a slight 0.2% increase in the last 24 hours and a 0.40% rise over the past week.

With a circulating supply of 28 billion XLM, Stellar holds a market capitalization of approximately $3.29 billion. Despite the critical nature of the Protocol 20 upgrade and the ensuing discussions, the market impact on XLM’s price remains relatively stable.