Protocol 15 Upgrade Complete!

Today at 1600 UTC, after many months of preparation and planning, the Stellar public network upgraded to Protocol 15!

Protocol 15 includes two new features — Claimable Balances and Sponsored Reserves — that make it easier than ever to build user-friendly apps on Stellar.  We've already seen both deployed to great effect on the testnet, and we're excited to see what you can do with them in a production environment.

Like all important network-wide settings, protocol version is decided by validating nodes, who vote for and agree to a new protocol version the same way they vote for and agree to transaction sets.  For more on how that works, see our Upgrading the Network doc.

It takes a lot of coordination to pull off a major protocol change, and we appreciate the diligence, patience, and effort everyone in the ecosystem put in to prepare.  If you haven't already, we encourage you to sign up for updates on our status page to make sure you're aware of network incidents and scheduled maintenance.  

If you're getting errors

If you haven't upgraded your Stellar-related software, you will likely experience issues today.  The fix is simple: install software that supports Protocol 15.  In general, installing that software is quick and easy, and once you do, you should be back up and running in no time. For links to relevant releases, see our Guide to Protocol 15 Prep. 

Stellar Core will immediately throw an error if it's not up to date, but Horizon and the Stellar SDKs may function as normal for a bit until they encounter — and are baffled by — one of the new operations.  So if you're reading this sometime after 11/23/20, and you're having trouble with your Stellar integration, there's a good chance upgrading is still the solution you're after

Check out the new features!

Protocol 15 includes the two new features mentioned above, which you can read about in this blog post.  If you want to dig right in, you can find out more about them here:

Claimable Balances

• Read the CAP
• Read the docs
• See the API Reference
• See an example 

Sponsored Reserves

• Read the CAP
• Read the docs
• See the API Reference 
• See an example 

As always, we are very cautious with network upgrades, and put a great deal of effort into making sure the ecosystem is informed well in advance. If this upgrade is catching you by surprise, please let us know! You can email me directly: [email protected].