Stellar (XLM) Gets Smart Contract Upgrade: What’s New?

XLM sees major shift for stored contract data as Stellar blockchain turns 11.

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The Soroban SDK, a Rust-based software development kit used to write smart contracts for Stellar’s smart contract platform, Soroban, has received a new upgrade.

According to the Build on Stellar X account, Soroban SDK v28 is now live. This release supports Protocol 28, which launched on September 16.

soroban-sdk v28 is now live 🛠

TL;DR: stored contract data is no longer locked into the shape you first wrote it in. For most contracts this is a rebuild and nothing else.

From Leigh McCulloch (@___leigh___) , Principal Software Engineer @ Stellar 👇 pic.twitter.com/8TMjiwmPZD

Adapter (Protocol 28), an upgrade that brought faster consensus, atomic upgrades for fleets of contracts, and a safer, standard way to migrate contract data, launched on the mainnet on September 16.

In line with this, Version 28 of the Soroban Rust SDK has been released, which contains a variety of build system changes, new behavior to better support contract data migration, and new features.

This includes Spec Shaking v2, contract data migration, sparsely published events, executable references, and native contracts that can be uploaded in tests.

Spec Shaking v2 changes the way that specs are included, using one of the same principles that compilers use to determine if code should be included in the final binary: dead code elimination. The SDK now emits an entry for everything, and the build system in stellar-cli strips the entries the contract does not use.

A struct is represented on the ledger as a map keyed by field names. Before v28, that map had to match the struct exactly—every field of the struct had to be present as a key, and no other key could be present.

Stellar is celebrating its 11th anniversary, having launched on September 30, 2015. Stellar has spent 11 years building a network focused on making money move faster and more freely. Stellar keeps bringing blockchain closer to the real world, ranging from cross-border payments to tokenized assets. Along these lines, in a recent milestone, Stellar just passed 22,000 RWA holders.

Tomer Weller, Stellar Foundation head of product, shares a fun fact about Stellar’s anniversary date. He noted that this is the anniversary of the “new” Stellar network. The “old” Stellar network launched a year before that in 2014 with the native currency “Stellars” and the ticker ‘STR.’