Stellar Marks 11th Anniversary with Major Upgrade to Soroban Smart Contracts
The Stellar network celebrated its eleventh anniversary on September 16 by launching a major update to its Soroban smart contracts platform. The Build on Stellar team announced that the Soroban SDK v28 is now live on mainnet, supporting Protocol 28, also known as Adapter.
This update brings several key improvements, including faster consensus, atomic upgrades for contract fleets, and a standardized mechanism to migrate contract data in a more secure way. According to Leigh McCulloch, Principal Software Engineer at Stellar, stored contract data is no longer locked into the shape it was first written in, simplifying the rebuild process.
The new version of the Soroban Rust SDK also includes Spec Shaking v2, executable references, and native contracts that can be loaded in test environments. This optimized compilation process is achieved through dead code elimination, which determines which entries to include in the final binary.