Stellar Development Foundation details major upgrades to Stellar Core aimed at achieving 5000 TPS and reducing block time to 2.5 seconds. The improvements parallelize transaction dissemination, consensus voting, and block execution across separate threads, with v22.1.0 already deployed and showing significant main thread pressure reduction.
The Stellar Development Foundation is implementing a series of major upgrades to Stellar Core to support the network's scaling goals of 5000 transactions per second and 2.5-second block times. The architecture redesign separates three previously sequential workstreams: transaction dissemination, consensus voting via the Stellar Consensus Protocol, and block execution. Initial changes in v22.1.0 moved transaction processing to dedicated thread pools, reducing main thread contention. The endgame vision involves pipelining consensus and execution so validators vote on block N+1 while applying block N, keeping all components continuously active. Starting with v22.3.0, background signature verification will further optimize performance. This approach leverages existing CPU capacity on modern hardware without requiring validator hardware upgrades.