Stellar's Soroban SDK v28 is now live, marking a major milestone for the network's smart contract capabilities following the mainnet launch of Protocol 28 on September 16.
According to Build on Stellar, the Rust-based Soroban SDK now supports the Protocol 28 upgrade, also known as Adapter, which introduced faster consensus, atomic upgrades for fleets of contracts, and a safer, standard way to migrate contract data. The release includes build system changes, improved contract data migration behavior, and new features such as Spec Shaking v2, sparsely published events, executable references, and native contracts that can be uploaded in tests.
Leigh McCulloch, principal software engineer at Stellar, explained that stored contract data is no longer locked into the shape it was first written in. For most contracts, the change requires only a rebuild. Spec Shaking v2 changes how specifications are included by applying dead code elimination: the SDK emits an entry for everything, and the build system in stellar-cli strips the entries a contract does not use.
The upgrade arrives as Stellar celebrates its 11th anniversary, having launched on September 30, 2015. The network recently surpassed 22,000 real-world asset holders, and the Stellar Foundation has highlighted its focus on cross-border payments and tokenized assets.
