The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 roadmap goal to double Tier 1 network resilience from 7 to 13 organizations, increasing fault tolerance from 2 to 4 organization failures. The post explains how Stellar's proof-of-agreement consensus works, the history of validator coordination, and the technical and organizational steps needed to achieve this decentralization milestone.
This blog post details SDF's Q4 2025 milestone to achieve 2x Tier 1 Resilience on the Stellar network. Currently, 7 tier-1 organizations form the backbone of network consensus, with the network able to tolerate 2 simultaneous failures. SDF plans to expand this to 13 organizations by year-end, doubling fault tolerance to 4 failures. The post explains Stellar's unique proof-of-agreement consensus protocol, where validators maintain trust lists based on organizational reputation rather than financial incentives. It traces the network's evolution from SDF being a single point of failure in early years to the current distributed model, then outlines completed technical improvements (overlay optimizations in Stellar Core v22.1.0 and v22.3.0), successful stress testing via Supercluster, and a pipeline of 10+ qualified validator candidates. SDF has also formalized its process for evaluating and adding organizations to quorum sets, with next steps involving community coordination to expand tier-1 participation.
