Stellar’s Adapter upgrade, Protocol 28, went live on mainnet on September 16, 2026. Its three changes address different parts of the network: CAP-83 adjusts consensus behavior under load, while CAP-85 and CAP-86 add opt-in tools for managing Soroban smart-contract upgrades and evolving contract data. The latter features require developers to use updated SDKs and rebuild their contracts; they do not change every existing contract automatically.
What is Adapter, and what changed?
Soroban is Stellar’s smart-contract platform. Adapter is the name of the Protocol 28 upgrade, whose changes are described in three Stellar network proposals, or CAPs. Two focus on the contract-development lifecycle; the third concerns consensus. Stellar Development Foundation’s overview of Adapter describes the changes and their intended uses.
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CAP-83: consensus behavior under load
CAP-83 changes how validators handle transaction sets during consensus. Validators can begin voting before a full transaction set has arrived and can explicitly discard a late or invalid set. The goal is to help consensus proceed more quickly under load. That design goal is not, by itself, evidence of a measured increase in throughput.
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CAP-85 lets contracts refer to a shared, externally managed executable. A contract team can update that shared reference so the contracts using it switch together, rather than managing separate executable updates that could leave a large deployment partly upgraded. SDF compares the pattern with a beacon proxy on other chains.
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This is a mechanism for developers to manage, not an automatic network-wide upgrade. Only contracts built to use the shared reference are affected when their team updates it.
CAP-86: sparse host functions for evolving data
CAP-86 adds sparse host functions that handle missing or additional fields more gracefully than the earlier map-conversion functions. They are intended to help developers change contract data structures and manage migrations as schemas evolve. The new functions are available through SDK updates, and a development team adopts them by rebuilding its contracts.
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Adding these functions does not automatically migrate stored data for deployed contracts. SDF’s guide says the additions do not create a backward incompatibility simply by being introduced; developers still need to choose and implement an appropriate migration for their contracts.
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Adapter has separate implications for network operators and contract developers. The Protocol 28 upgrade guide covers the network upgrade and the actions relevant to participants.
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- Validators and infrastructure operators: follow the release, upgrade, and synchronization requirements in the guide for their network role.
- Soroban contract teams: update SDKs and rebuild contracts to use CAP-85 or CAP-86 features. Using either feature is a developer choice, not an automatic consequence of the network upgrade.
- Contract users: the protocol changes alone do not mean every contract or application has adopted the new capabilities. Adoption depends on the teams maintaining those contracts.
How Adapter fits into Stellar’s Soroban timeline
Soroban smart-contract functionality first reached Stellar mainnet with Protocol 20. Validators voted to upgrade the network on February 20, 2024, according to the Protocol 20 upgrade guide. Stellar introduced that functionality in phases so network participants could observe performance, security, and stability as Soroban capacity increased; that was historical rollout context, not a description of Protocol 28’s status.
Protocol 23, activated in 2025, had already introduced parallel processing for smart-contract transactions and changes to Soroban state handling and caching. Those are Protocol 23 features, not part of Adapter. The Protocol 23 announcement provides the earlier upgrade’s details.
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The Protocol 28 guide scheduled the mainnet vote for September 16, 2026. A later U.Today report dated September 30, 2026 says Adapter went live that day. The guide was published ahead of the vote, so the later report is the confirmation of the completed mainnet activation.
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What Adapter does—and does not—establish
Adapter gives contract teams more control over executable upgrades and data-structure changes, while CAP-83 changes validator behavior around transaction sets. The published upgrade materials explain the design and intended benefits, but do not establish quantified post-upgrade changes in throughput, transaction cost, or user adoption. Those outcomes should not be inferred from the proposals alone.
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