- Stellar launches Protocol 23 “Whisk” today, September 3rd, with unified event formatting that simplifies development.
- Developers must update their applications to the latest Stellar SDKs before the upgrade, or their services will break.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced the implementation of Protocol 23, officially named “Whisk,” marking a significant milestone in the network’s evolution. The upgrade introduces sweeping changes to transaction processing and the developer experience, positioning Stellar to scale more effectively and achieve wider adoption.
Meet Whisk, the Protocol 23 upgrade going live tomorrow (Sept 3, 17:00 UTC) on Stellar.
We’re naming upgrades because names stick and these upgrades deserve to be remembered.
Like the tool, Whisk makes the complex simple. It blends data into one format and speeds up…
— Stellar (@StellarOrg) September 2, 2025
The protocol upgrade will start being voted on by validators today, September 3rd, at 10:00 AM PST (1700 UTC). To prevent possible issues with services, the Foundation cautions developers to update their apps to the most recent Stellar SDKs before the mainnet vote.
Protocol 23 is the first protocol version in the history of Stellar. The name assignment is alphabetical in terms of its use in everyday life, so the name Whisk is the 23rd letter W. Future protocols will go in this pattern as X, Y, Z, and back to A again.
Developer Experience Receives Major Overhaul
Whisk provides Unified Events, which resolves an old problem of fragmentation that made it difficult to develop applications. In the past, standard Stellar operations and smart contracts produced incompatible data formats, requiring developers to use different tracking systems.
The protocol standardizes event formatting across all transaction types. The operations performed by Smart contracts and classic ones generate the same data structure, and dual-tracking systems are no longer needed. The advantage of this change to wallets, analytics platforms, and decentralized applications is having a single, consistent stream of data.
The standardization minimizes the complexity of development and the overhead of maintenance. All network activity can now be handled by applications via unified interfaces, making integration work easier and minimizing the sources of errors.
Parallel Processing Transforms Network Performance
The protocol implements parallel processing of transactions in Stellar Core, as opposed to the former sequential processing model. The old system handled transactions using one thread, creating bottlenecks since the current hardware could handle more than one processing thread.
Stellar Core is now able to validate sets of transactions while collecting new transactions. Such parallel processing makes the cycle time between transaction batches much lower, leading to increased network effectiveness in general.
The update has triggered a marginal increase, with XLM recording a 2% rally in the last 24 hours. However, the coin is still down by nearly 5% over the previous 7 days, following a broader correction in the crypto market.
