Stellar’s Top Development of the Past Week: Release of Stellar Core v12.5.0

There were developments within the Stellar ecosystem over the past week, but the release of Stellar Core v12.5.0 topped the list of new developments.

The new release was announced via the official Twitter of Stellar (XLM) on 25th March 2020. According to the report, the new version of Stellar Core comes with new features such as SCP metrics and others.

“Stellar Core v12.5.0 is out now! It includes a number of new features including new SCP metrics, improved catchup logging, SCP code cleanup and more.”

Stellar Core v12.5.0 is out now! It includes a number of new features including new SCP metrics, improved catchup logging, SCP code cleanup and more.

Download it and read the full release notes here:https://t.co/4EjtptjTPq

— Stellar (@StellarOrg) March 25, 2020

Below are the stability improvements as shared on Github:

1. Reworked catchup code to improve its resiliency with events like running out of sync
2. Improved logging and status when catching up, which gives a lot more visibility into what core is doing
3. Changed the way we track percentiles reported by the metrics endpoint, with this version percentiles are using a fixed 5 minutes window, this results in percentiles to be a lot more consistent and accurate
4. Fixed a hang on shutdown where core was waiting for quorum intersection to complete
5. Improved how validators restart, avoiding momentarily not validating (ie, not sending SCP votes) for certain ledgers.
6. SCP code code cleanup to make it easier to understand
7. Fixed how we compute prefetching metrics
8. Fix an issue in experimental metadata generation as certain syscalls are not supported on named pipes
9. mempool, don’t bother with transactions that will fail later anyways
10. Fixed various test issues – missing tests and flaky test

Implementation of CAP-0015: Fee Bump Transactions

In another development, CAP-0015: Fee Bump Transactions has been implemented. According to the report, the new implementation will be duly included in Protocol 13.

This implies that in the event of a pre-occupied transaction such as the release of escrow funds cannot be executed as a result of fees increment.

Moreover, this will enable services to directly and discreetly pay for their users’ fees. At the moment, services have to send their users’ Stellar Lumens with the hope of serving as fees. In this regard, CAP-0015 will provide a proper solution to such problems and improve the means of onboarding users.