Stellar validators will vote on Protocol 19 upgrade on June 8, 2022, introducing new transaction preconditions and signer types to enable payment channels, bridges, and key recovery solutions. The upgrade enables Layer 2 scaling with Starlight prototype achieving 1.19 million payments per second.
Protocol 19, voting on Stellar's public network June 8, 2022, implements two Core Advancement Proposals: CAP-21 adds transaction preconditions for sequence number skipping, ledger bounds, relative timelocks, and hash locks; CAP-40 introduces a new signer type enabling atomic authorization of multiple transactions. These changes facilitate payment channels and other Layer 2 protocols. The Starlight prototype, built by SDF engineers using Protocol 19 features, demonstrated 1.19 million payments per second between two users on consumer hardware. Beyond payment channels, Protocol 19 enables state channels, hash time locked contracts, key recovery solutions, and other use cases documented in CAP-21's design rationale.
