The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 scalability roadmap to increase Stellar Core's theoretical throughput to 5000 TPS through five key initiatives: Protocol 23 with multi-threaded smart contract execution, increased parallelism in Core, decoupling consensus from execution, aggressive caching for state loads, and improved benchmarking frameworks.
The SDF has published a comprehensive overview of its 2025 scalability efforts aimed at achieving 5000 transactions per second on Stellar Core. The five-pillar approach includes Protocol 23, which introduces multi-threaded smart contract execution and WebAssembly caching without requiring hardware upgrades; increased parallelism by moving signature verification and block execution to background processing; decoupling consensus from execution to allow parallel voting and transaction processing; aggressive in-memory caching to reduce state load bottlenecks; and refined benchmarking to accurately measure real system limits. These improvements leverage Soroban's parallel-friendly design and existing validator infrastructure, with results to be published transparently with each Stellar Core release. The SDF emphasizes responsible scaling that maintains decentralization, keeps hardware costs reasonable, and ensures downstream systems like Horizon and Stellar RPC can handle increased volumes.
