Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #62

A new Stellar Core release and how to integrate with Stellar’s global network of anchors.

Hey everyone! Welcome to another issue of the Stellar Dev Digest, a weekly recap of all things related to the development of the Stellar Network.

What is Stellar? Stellar is a platform that connects banks, payment systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.

News & Posts of the Week

• Reminder: The Protocol 14 rollout is underway! The testnet upgraded 9/30, and the vote to upgrade the public network is schedule for 10/28. If you’re building on Stellar, you need to prepare by installing up-to-date versions of relevant software, including Stellar Core, Horizon, and any Stellar SDKs you use. Here’s a guide with everything you need to know to get up to speed.
• This Wednesday (Oct. 7), at 12:00 PM EST, SDF is hosting a special roundtable webinar on “Achieving Network Effects” with the board members of the Stellar Development Foundation. — Register here.
• Also this Wednesday: SDF’s Senior Strategist, Lisa Nestor, will join a webinar hosted by The Block on the state of international remittances. — Register here.
• Wow, two more things on Wednesday: Jed McCaleb and Denelle Dixon will both be speaking at the LA Blockchain Summit. Jed will be discussing “The Future of Payment Networks: Scalability Challenges and Solutions,” and Denelle will be discussing “Digital Identity, Open Money, and the Framework for a Truly Decentralized Global Internet”. — Register here.
• Last week, SDF released a guide that explains which standards (i.e. SEPs) to implement to take advantage of Stellar’s global network of anchors. — Read it here.
• SDF’s Senior Strategist, Lisa Nestor, and Settle’s Chief Financial Officer, Mary Saracco, teamed up to pen an article that describes how taking blockchain tech from buzzword to essential technology should have a singular focus: making it useful for people’s everyday lives. — Read it here.
• Ledger users can now create Stellar accounts in their Ledger Vault workspaces to send and receive XLM. — Announcement here.

Application of the Week

This week I’m featuring Stellarbeat.io — a Stellar network visibility tool!

Completely open source, Stellarbeat.io is a data crawler and visualization tool that finds and queries all nodes on the Stellar network, gathers as much information about them as possible, and presents that information in a meaningful way.

Stellarbeat.io has been around for a while (at least since 2018), but they’ve recently added some new features worth highlighting:

• Aggregated network statistics & visualizations
• Liveness & safety risk analysis charts (be sure to checkout the info boxes for more information)
• Quorum intersection & top tier size indication
• A network analysis tool that provides info on liveness risk, safety risk, and quorum intersection

If you run a validator or if you’re interested in keeping up with the health of the network — make sure to check out Stellarbeat.io’s data and open API!

Releases and Updates

Stellar Core v14.1.1 is out! This release fixes a critical issue (that’s existed in all previous versions of Stellar Core) that may cause some nodes to fail to replay historical data. The issue can cause nodes to corrupt their local state, and the only way to recover is to reset the local state. Find the release here.

Reminder for SDK Maintainers: You should have an SDK issue on your tracker that includes Protocol 14 implementation details. This issue lists the changes to the Horizon API introduced by CAP-23 and CAP-33. Here’s an example.

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Active Discussions

💬 This week I’m highlighting a conversation around a newly proposed CAP — CAP-0035: Asset Clawback!

The discussion around this functionality started back in March. Here’s the premise:

Some regulated asset issuers are interested in the ability to claw back assets unilaterally to comply with various regulations. The Stellar protocol allows revoking (“deauthorizing”) trustlines. However, that doesn’t completely solve the problem. First, the balance remains in the unauthorized trustlines. Second, there’s no way to claw back a partial balance.

This proposal provides the issuer with a means to clawback (and reissue if desired) assets in order to support regulatory requirements. This function can be used to recover assets that have been fraudulently obtained, respond to regulatory actions, and — if required — enable identity-proofed persons to recover an enabled asset in the event of loss of key custody or theft.

This proposal would add a new flag to an asset’s issuing account and introduce a new CLAWBACK operation. The CLAWBACK_ENABLED flag on the issuing account must be set to authorize a CLAWBACK operation submitted by the issuing account. The CLAWBACK operation results in the removal of the specified assets issued from the designated account. The CLAWBACK operation only applies to assets issued by the source account. Assets with CLAWBACK enabled can be easily distinguished from traditional blockchain assets (bearer instruments) so that asset owners are aware of rights.

👉 While still early in the CAP process, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Join the conversation on the mailing list or in the Github pull request.

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Did I Miss Something?

If you found that something from this issue is missing or inaccurate reach out to me (kolten) on Keybase and I’ll make sure to fix it 👍