Stellar (XLM) Welcomes Major Releases, Price up 8%

Stellar (XLM) is trading higher, up 8% in the last seven days. The price is currently at $0.2529, up 2% in the last 24 hours, which has seen new update releases for the Stellar ecosystem.

According to a Stellar release, an X handle that shares updates to the Stellar ecosystem, Stellar Core v23.0.0rc2, a preliminary release of protocol 23, is live. This release contains all the protocol changes for the protocol 23 CAPs (CAP-62 to CAP-70, except the rejected CAP-64) and is a release candidate for protocol 23, which will be promoted to "stable" if the protocol 23 upgrade is successful on testnet.

Other releases include Stable Release v0.3.0, which includes advanced access control modules, enhanced features for stablecoins and NFTs, and a new Merkle Tree component. The majority of these new functionalities are now available directly in the OpenZeppelin Contracts Wizard for Stellar.

Stellar gears up for major upgrade

Protocol 23 is expected to bring new Core Advancement Proposals (CAPs) to the Stellar network.

New features in protocol 23 include state archival features that enable Soroban's live state to be moved into memory, support for parallel execution of Soroban transactions using a new "parallel" transaction set structure and a reusable inter-ledger cache for the Soroban Wasm modules, drastically lowering the cost of making cross-contract calls.

Other features include support for "unified" events, which enable the use of Soroban events to track any movement of tokens on the network: Stellar Core would be able to generate SEP-41-compliant events from all operations that include value movement.

The CAP-0067: Unified Asset Events also includes Soroban support for "multiplexed" accounts (M-accounts) and Stellar asset contract support for "multiplexed" transfer destinations, allowing for the implementation of exchange crypto-deposits of Soroban tokens and others.

The mainnet vote on the protocol 23 upgrade is scheduled for Aug. 14, 2025.