Stellar Activates Protocol 28 Amid Record-Breaking Throughput and Growing Economic Activity

The Stellar network has activated Protocol 28, which brings atomic contract-fleet upgrades and new consensus tooling. This upgrade coincided with a record-breaking throughput of 211 transactions per second, set by blockchain analysis firm Chainspect.

Protocol 28's CAP-85 targets protocols that run multiple instances of the same smart contract, allowing developers to have those contracts reference an externally managed executable. This enables changes to be made in a single atomic operation, reducing the window for security fixes or software migrations.

The upgrade also includes CAP-86, which tackles the problem of changing data structures already stored by live contracts. New sparse-map functions allow developers to migrate information progressively, rather than requiring records to conform immediately to a new schema.

Stellar's economic activity has been growing, with stablecoin supply rising to nearly $884 million and tokenized real-world assets reaching $3.3 billion in market capitalization. The next test for Protocol 28 will come from developers and validators, who must opt into the new contract-management features while Stellar gradually enables consensus changes intended to support heavier traffic.