Protocol 18 Upgrade Complete!

Today, November 3, 2021 at 15:00 UTC, the Stellar public network successfully upgraded to Protocol 18. It's a big day and a big upgrade because it adds native support for automated market makers (AMMs) to Stellar.

Over the past few months, we've written a series of blog posts introducing AMMs, explaining how AMMs and liquidity pools work on Stellar and why they work that way, and detailing how participants across the ecosystem collaborated to develop, integrate, and support them. We also documented liquidity pools in detail for anyone who wants to get technical. So if you want to find out more, there's plenty to read!

If you're here because you're having trouble with your Stellar integration, don't fret! Older versions of Stellar-related software aren't fully compatible with Protocol 18, and you can likely resolve your issues by installing up-to-date versions of Stellar Core, Horizon, and any SDKs you use. For instructions and links to relevant releases, see our Protocol 18 Upgrade Guide. That guide also has more information on the breaking changes introduced in Protocol 18, which include new liquidity pool operations, a new kind of asset, and changes to trade precision.

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. That way, you will have advance warning about future protocol upgrades. You can also join the Stellar Developers Discord for general updates and to interact with the vibrant ecosystem of Stellar devs.

As always, the network upgrade to Protocol 18 required the assent of validators, who vote for and agree to a new protocol version just like they vote for and agree to apply transaction sets to the ledger. Anyone can run a validator and participate in network governance. If you're interested, check out the Run a Core Node section of the docs.

Finally, we'd like to thank the Stellar ecosystem for your support, feedback, and cooperation throughout the Protocol 18 process. Every network upgrade takes a ton of effort and coordination, and we appreciate your willingness to work together to help Stellar continue to evolve to bigger and better things!