The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 roadmap progress toward achieving 5000 TPS and 2.5-second block times through major Stellar Core upgrades. The post details the first phase of parallelization: isolating transaction dissemination to separate threads, which is now enabled by default in Stellar Core v22.1.0, with signature verification parallelization coming in v22.3.0.
The SDF is executing a multi-phase upgrade strategy for Stellar Core to support higher throughput and lower latency as Soroban usage grows. The article explains how Stellar Core's three work streams—transaction dissemination, consensus voting, and block execution—were previously bottlenecked on a single main thread. The solution involves dedicating separate thread pools to each workload and ultimately achieving pipelined consensus and execution, where validators vote on block N+1 while applying block N. The first implemented improvement, enabled by default in v22.1.0 via the BACKGROUND_OVERLAY_PROCESSING flag, parallelizes transaction dissemination and traffic deduplication, significantly reducing main thread pressure. Future releases will parallelize block execution and enable background signature verification, progressively moving toward the full pipelining vision.
