Stellar Protocol 21 went live on June 18, 2024, introducing five Core Advancement Proposals including native secp256r1 verification for passkey support in smart contracts, alongside efficiency improvements for state archival and transaction costs.
Stellar's mainnet validators approved Protocol 21, activating five CAPs that enhance the network's capabilities. The most significant addition is native secp256r1 verification support, enabling passkey signing for smart contracts—allowing users to authenticate via biometrics or hardware tokens instead of seed phrases. Beyond passkeys, Protocol 21 introduces CAP-0053 for separate TTL management of contract instances and code, CAP-0054 refining VM instantiation costs, CAP-0055 streamlining host function linking to reduce CPU overhead, and CAP-0056 implementing intra-transaction module caching. Together, these improvements lower transaction costs, improve network scalability, and enhance throughput while maintaining security.
