Stellar Development Foundation research team discusses performance and scalability improvements including JIT execution for Soroban contracts, parallel processing strategies, network overlay optimization, and consensus protocol enhancements targeting sub-second latency.
The Stellar Development Foundation's research team presented ongoing work on performance and scalability improvements for the network. Key research areas include JIT compilation for Soroban smart contracts to reduce execution overhead from 100x to 10x slowdown compared to native performance, parallel processing of consensus and ledger application phases, and network optimization through structured overlays and erasure codes. The team is also redesigning the SCP consensus protocol to separate nomination and ballot phases, reducing message count and enabling sub-second latency. Additional strategies include optimizing block propagation and leader election. The foundation is hiring a director of research to expand investigation beyond scalability into other critical network topics.