On October 9, SDF discovered a bug in Stellar's state archival feature (Protocol 23) that caused outdated entries to be archived and restored incorrectly. The network immediately paused archival eviction and deployed a patch to quarantine corrupted entries, affecting only 478 smart contract entries out of ~47 million ledger entries.
The Stellar Development Foundation discovered a critical bug in Stellar's state archival feature introduced in Protocol 23 (Whisk), which archives unused state to prevent blockchain bloat and keep fees low. The bug caused outdated versions of entries to be archived and then restored with incorrect values, corrupting the ledger state. SDF and Tier 1 validators responded immediately by pausing archival eviction and deploying a patch release that quarantined all corrupted entries. Analysis revealed only 478 smart contract entries were affected, with 84 corrupted entries restored to the live ledger before quarantine. A permanent fix requiring Protocol 24 has been proposed via CAP-0076, which would revert corrupted entries that were never restored to their pre-archival state. The network will vote on the upgrade on October 22, with testnet upgrade on October 21. Importantly, all transactions remain immutable in the permanent ledger—only internal database values for corrupted, unused data will be corrected.
