XOXNO's team hit Soroban memory limits while scaling complex DeFi strategies. Their debugging journey identified that cross-contract calls were consuming full 1 MB of linear memory per call—a transient cost never credited back. A protocol-level fix refunding VM memory at teardown is coming in an upgrade; meanwhile, Reflector's compile flag optimization provides immediate relief, unlocking more complex on-chain flows for the ecosystem.
XOXNO, a lending protocol on Stellar, discovered that Soroban transactions have a hard 40 MB memory limit that was severely constraining complex DeFi strategies. The team traced the bottleneck to a quirk in Rust compilation defaults: every cross-contract call was allocating a full 1 MB of linear memory, and that memory was never credited back after the call finished, so it kept counting toward the transaction limit. The investigation led to a two-part solution. First, the Stellar core protocol will implement a fix refunding transient VM memory at frame teardown—this goes into the upcoming upgrade and will permanently expand what's possible for DeFi protocols. In the meantime, working with Reflector, XOXNO deployed a compile-flag workaround that reduces the initial linear memory size, already giving meaningful headroom on mainnet. The win illustrates how pushing infrastructure to its limits can surface systemic constraints that benefit the whole ecosystem when fixed.
