Fee Bump Bug Disclosure and the Impact on the Protocol 20 Upgrade
Justin
Hello Stellar Devs,
Yesterday, as part of the continued ecosystem-wide effort to test Soroban, a bug was discovered in Stellar Core v20.1.0 that could impact applications and services that use fee bumps for Soroban transactions if/when the Mainnet upgrades to Protocol 20. Read all about it:
https://stellar.org/blog/developers/fee-bump-bug-disclosure
We, the Stellar Development Foundation in our capacity as a validator, have decided we are comfortable continuing with the Protocol 20 upgrade vote on January 30 as planned, and the post explains why. But it's up to other validators to make their own decisions, and we started a thread on the Stellar Dev Discord to gather feedback and discuss next steps. If you have questions, suggestions, or opinions, we encourage you to share them there. Or, if you can't post to the Discord thread for any reason, please share your thoughts here.
Some specific questions:
– Application developers: does this affect your application, and if so is this mitigation plan sufficient?
– Validators: please signal support or disapproval of the plan to upgrade as planned to Protocol 20.
It's a massive undertaking to bring Soroban to Mainnet, and it's only possible due to your continued contribution, cooperation, and candor. Thank you for working together to make it happen! We really appreciate you, Stellar ecosystem.
Justin
Update: After hearing the concerns expressed by various participants in the Stellar ecosystem — including contract developers, wallet developers, validators, and tools builders — the SDF has decided to disarm our validators to prevent them from voting to upgrade the network to Protocol 20 on January 30. As the network introduces the biggest protocol change to date, it's important to have broad consensus at the vote, but also in the lead up to it — everyone needs to be ready.
Please read the updated post for more information, including instructions for how to disarm your validator should you choose to do so:
No matter what validators decide to do next, the SDF will continue to work to resolve the bug, and to engage in discussions with other validators in both public and private channels. If validators opt to postpone the upgrade, we will coordinate to determine a future vote date once a new version of Stellar Core that contains a bug fix is released. That release should be available within the next two weeks.