Stellar's Protocol 30 upgrade, Bell, is “live on Testnet,” the Stellar Development Foundation said on Nov. 3, opening developer testing ahead of a Nov. 23 validator vote on mainnet activation.

The release gives smart contracts new ways to identify customer deposits and verify post-quantum signatures. Wallets, exchanges and infrastructure providers must update their Stellar software libraries before the mainnet vote, according to SDF's upgrade guide. Existing smart contracts can keep running unchanged.

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New Tools for Smart Accounts

$CAP-84 introduces muxed contract addresses: a contract address paired with a customer identifier, written in a new format beginning with W. This lets a business route deposits for multiple customers into one smart contract and track their balances offchain. Stellar already supported that model for regular accounts, but not contract addresses.

Funds still reach the underlying contract, with the identifier recorded in the transfer event; it does not create a separate onchain balance. Wallets and exchanges must accept W addresses in their validation, display and storage logic. Contract developers who want to accept them must use an address parameter that supports the muxed variant—a plain address parameter rejects it.

$CAP-87 adds three built-in verification functions for ML-DSA, a standardized post-quantum signature algorithm, to Stellar's Soroban smart-contract environment. Custom account contracts can use them to require post-quantum authorization to spend funds, rather than implementing the verification themselves. Network-level transaction signatures remain Ed25519.

The new contract features are opt-in. Builders adopting them must rebuild against the updated Soroban SDK and use a matching or newer Stellar command-line tool, SDF says.

A New Ledger Format

$CAP-88 adds millisecond-resolution ledger close timestamps. Previously, whole-second timestamps imposed a one-second minimum gap between ledgers and prevented targets such as 4.5 seconds. The change removes that timing constraint; SDF's protocol overview says Bell does not, by itself, make ledgers close faster.

Indexers, explorers and other systems decoding raw ledger data must update their target="__blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ">upgrade rules, validators configure their nodes to vote from a specified time, and adoption requires the same consensus used to approve transaction sets. Agreement follows each node's trusted-validator set and threshold, rather than a token-holder ballot.

Mainnet activation depends on that agreement. SDF instructs validators to install Stellar Core v30.0.0 and says the command to arm their nodes for the vote will be shared through validator channels beforehand.