Stellar Development Foundation introduces Starlight, a Layer 2 payment channel protocol achieving 1+ million payments per second while maintaining fast finality. The protocol leverages new Stellar protocol upgrades (CAP-21, CAP-40) and buffering techniques to enable high-throughput transactions between two participants.
The Stellar Development Foundation has unveiled Starlight, a Layer 2 bi-directional payment channel protocol designed to scale Stellar beyond current blockchain capabilities while preserving fast and safe finality. Starlight achieves 1.19 million payments per second when buffered across 12 agreements per second, far exceeding enterprise transaction needs. The protocol's efficiency comes from three key innovations: transaction preconditions (CAP-21) that enable relative time locks and minimum sequence numbers, atomic signature disclosure (CAP-40) that authorizes multiple transactions in a single message, and buffering that batches payments during network latency windows. A prototype Go SDK is now available on devnet for developers to experiment with, and SDF is seeking community feedback on use cases and future development.
