Stellar Lumen (XLM) skyrockets by 68%

• The XLM price has risen more than 68% to a new yearly high of $0,17 in 2020.
• Stellar rolls out Protocol 15 that comes with sponsored reserves and claimable balances.

After a top executive at Stellar, Justin Rice, announced that Stellar has upgraded its Protocol from 13 to 15 on November 23, the price of XLM rose by a massive 68% in the past week. Justin made the protocol announcement via a blog post on the platform.

Protocol 15 is an upgrade of the platform’s Protocol 13. Stellar had been preparing and planning for this singular update for the best part of the last two months. According to Justin, this upgrade comes with improvement in the sponsored reserves and the claimable balances on the platform. They will help to make the process of creating new apps easier, simpler and faster on the Stellar blockchain.

Justin went on to state that the upgrades have been tested on Stellar testnet. He also notes the excitement the Stellar team has to see how their users make use of this new upgrades on their platform.

You will recall that Stellar did not carry out its upgrade to Stellar network Protocol 14. This was because of the discovery of a bug when the protocol was being tested. It was observed then that the bug would affect the overall performance of the Protocol and as such, the team decided to release the fix in its Protocol 15.

Protocol 13 was the initial protocol to bring loads of development when it comes to the control a user has over asset authorization. The protocol also saw to the development made in fee bump transactions.

Understanding the new Stellar upgrades

Through the sponsored reserve upgrade, users can be able to pay the base reserves for other accounts. This means that sponsoring accounts have to enable a sponsoring-future-reserves-for relationship on their dashboards. When this is enabled, reserves that should accumulate on the sponsored accounts will now reflect on the sponsoring account. Also, to ensure transparency, the operations will appear in one single transaction.

Generally, the feature allows anything that can help increase the minimum balance to be sponsored. This means a user can choose to sponsor accounts, offers, trustlines, account data, and even signers. This depends on his choice or the agreement he strikes with the owner of the account he is sponsoring.

Claimable balances, on the other hand, is also a unique new feature. To enjoy this feature, the balances must be sponsored. It should be noted that this feature is not a sub-entry of the account.

Sponsoring accounts are the ones saddled with using the available sponsorship mechanism available to them. They then use this mechanism to make payments of the base reserve. This feature also ensures transparency. Users can see how their claimable balances operate as it also uses the sponsorship logic.

This new updates are also in line with Stellar’s network aim of maintaining its decentralized, open-source, and universal nature while fostering a sustainable use cases for their applications.