Protocol 23 is a major update for the Stellar network, featuring eight new Core Advancement Proposals (CAPs) designed to enhance performance and scalability. These updates include the introduction of live state prioritization, which organizes ledger data into ‘Live State’ and ‘Hot Archive’ databases for better performance. Parallelism-friendly transaction scheduling will enable faster smart contract processing by utilizing multiple CPU cores, while the introduction of a reusable Wasm module cache reduces redundancy and transaction costs. The new Soroban in-memory read resource improves throughput by eliminating disk reads during smart contract execution. Unified asset events will standardize event streams from different processes, and configurable SCP timing parameters allow for dynamic adjustments to ledger operations, opening the door to future scalability enhancements.
