@StellarOrg has scheduled validator votes on Protocol 30, called Bell, for November 3 on testnet and November 23 on mainnet. The upgrade for the Stellar network, whose native token is $XLM, c
@StellarOrg has scheduled validator votes on Protocol 30, called Bell, for November 3 on testnet and November 23 on mainnet. The upgrade for the Stellar network, whose native token is $XLM, combines new smart account features with an early step toward quantum-resistant security, according to Coinfomania.
Bell lets a single smart account hold funds for multiple customers through a new address format that starts with the letter W. The design is aimed at businesses that need to manage many customer balances without opening a separate account for each one. Coinfomania describes the release as focused on making smart accounts ready for businesses.
Developer tracking on GitHub also points to the change. An open issue in a Stellar .NET SDK repository lists Protocol 30 readiness work that includes muxed contract addresses (CAP-84) and support for the new W-prefixed address encoding.
Smart contracts on Stellar will also be able to verify ML-DSA signatures. ML-DSA is the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm, published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in August 2024 as FIPS 204. NIST describes FIPS 204 as the primary standard for protecting digital signatures, and it is based on the CRYSTALS-Dilithium algorithm.
The standard matters because widely used signature schemes such as RSA and ECDSA rely on maths problems that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could solve, which would let an attacker forge signatures, according to Encryption Consulting.
The change is limited in scope. Regular network transactions will keep today's signatures, so the upgrade adds the option for contracts to check post-quantum signatures rather than replacing the network's existing signing method. One trade-off is size: ML-DSA signatures are considerably larger than classical ones, ranging from 2,420 to 4,627 bytes depending on the parameter set, according to an arXiv paper on post-quantum signatures for blockchains.
Bell also introduces a millisecond ledger clock. This lets future upgrades set block times in fractions of a second, although the release itself does not change block times.
Validators will vote on the testnet upgrade first, with the mainnet vote following on November 23. Developers running Stellar infrastructure or SDKs will need compatible software before the mainnet vote. Previous Stellar protocol upgrades have come with upgrade guides listing key dates and SDK requirements, and similar guidance is likely for Bell.
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