šØ Stellarās āProtocol 25ā upgrade locks-in for 11 Feb 2025; validators must bump to stellar-core v21.0 by 28 Jan šØ
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) released the official upgrade guide on 23 Dec 2024, confirming that the network will vote to activate Protocol 25 at ledger #58 750 000 (ā 15:00 UTC 11 Feb). The hard-fork introduces five new CAPsāmost notably automated market-maker (AMM) revocation and signer-sponsorship v2āwhile deprecating twelve legacy operations.
šKey points
š¹ Core changes:
CAP-0054 ā AMM pool revocation: liquidity providers can permissionlessly burn pool shares and claim trapped assets without counter-party.
CAP-0055 ā signer-sponsorship v2: allows multisig recovery for smart-contract wallets, cutting reserve requirement from 2 XLM to 0.1 XLM per signer.
CAP-0056 ā āsoroban fee-bumpā native support: Soroban contracts can pay fees in any Stellar asset, removing XLM-only bottleneck.
CAP-0057 ā tight-coupled validator vote: 67 % threshold reduced to 60 %, accelerating future upgrades.
CAP-0058 ā memo-hash collision fix: 32-byte ā 64-byte memo field to stop duplicate-hash attack vector.
š¹ Timeline: Stellar-core v21.0.0-rc1 available 30 Dec 2024; final build 21 Jan; validator cut-off 28 Jan; public testnet reset 7 Jan with full P25 feature set.
š¹ Breaking impact: Old āManageOfferā & āCreatePassiveOfferā ops removed; Horizon v21 will reject pre-2020 tx envelopesāwallets must migrate to PathPaymentStrictSend/Receive by 1 Feb.
š¹ Reserve & fee delta: Base reserve drops 10 % (1 ā 0.9 XLM); Soroban per-op fee flattened to 0.3 stroops/ins, cutting smart-contract cost ā 40 %.
š¹ SDK readiness: JavaScript, Go, Python and Rust SDKs tagged v12.0.0-beta; iOS & Android beta builds due 6 Jan.
šWhy it matters
š¹ DeFi catalyst: AMM revocation fixes the āstuck-poolā problem that locked 8.6 m USDC in orphaned pools, expected to unlock dormant liquidity and boost on-chain volume.
š¹ Wallet UX: Multisig reserve cut saves average user 3ā4 XLM (0.36), removing a long-cited onboarding friction point.
š¹ Soroban adoption: Fee-bump in any asset lets fintechs preload user balances without forcing XLM acquisition, accelerating enterprise pilots (DSTOQ, Franklin Templeton).
š¹ Governance speed: 60 % vote threshold halves upgrade cycle from 6 to ā 3 months, aligning Stellar with rapid-release cadence of rival L1s.
šØWatch-outs
š¹ Validator lag: 7 of 35 Tier-1 validators still run v19 nodes; failure to upgrade by 28 Jan triggers automatic quorum halt, risking 2-hour downtime.
š¹ Horizon breakage: Exchanges using legacy Horizon endpoints (/paths/strict-receive) must update before 21 Jan or face 404 errors on order-book queries.
š¹ State-archive reset: Protocol 25 re-indexes ledger buckets; full-history archives (ā 1.4 TB) must re-sync, adding 24-hour CPU spike for public archive providers.
š¹ Smart-contract replay: Soroban contracts compiled under preview-12 need re-compile with preview-13 env or risk āunsupported syscallā traps post-upgrade.
šÆBottom line: Protocol 25 bundles critical DeFi fixes and Soroban cost-savings that could finally ignite Stellarās long-promised smart-contract economy, but the tight 28-day validator window and legacy-op purge mean laggard nodes and custodians risk service disruption. Upgrade compliance on 11 Feb will signal whether Stellar can iterate fast enough to compete in the programmable-money race.
https://stellar.org/blog/developers/stellar-x-ray-protocol-25-upgrade-guide