Stellar Foundation Calls for Upgrade Delay After Bug Discovery

• Non-SDF validators on Stellar still have the option to vote in favor of the upgrade.
• The issue arises when a “Soroban” transaction request is submitted.

The team of Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) discovered an issue in Stellar Core v20.1.0, which caused the upgrading of the smart contracts on the Stellar blockchain to be postponed until the end of January.

The SDF said in a blog post-dated January 27 that they have chosen to de-arm their validators in order to delay the Protocol 20 vote scheduled for January 30 until a bug patch has been implemented.

Soroban Transaction Request Error

The vulnerability, discovered on January 25th, was described by the foundation as having “little risk” but the ability to affect a number of apps. A solution is now in development and should be released within two weeks, according to the SDF.

On the other hand, non-SDF validators on Stellar still have the option to vote in favor of the Protocol 20 upgrade on January 30th, so the SDF isn’t the only one with a say in the matter.

SDF further added:

“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.”

SDF said that in order for the Protocol 20 update to be approved, a minimum number of voting validators are needed. In December 2023, there were 43 validator nodes, as reported by Stellarbeat.io.

The issue arises when a “Soroban” transaction request is submitted, but the outcome is a refund and the user is hit with a fee. In a GitHub post on January 25, the SDF indicated that the reimbursement isn’t being transferred to the fee-bump’s source account correctly under the present implementation.

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