The Stellar Foundation Roadmap for 2026: Key Milestones and What Developers Should Know

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has laid out an ambitious roadmap for 2026, focusing on scalability, developer experience, and positioning Stellar as the blockchain of choice for regulated financial applications. Whether you're building payment apps, tokenization platforms, or DeFi protocols, these changes will impact how you architect and deploy your applications.

The Big Picture: Stellar's 2026 Vision

SDF's roadmap centers around four pillars:

Let's break down each area and what it means for your applications.

Pillar 1: Scaling to 5000 TPS

Where We Are

Stellar currently handles approximately 100-200 TPS during peak activity. While this is already faster than many blockchains, institutional use cases like real world asset tokenization demand significantly higher throughput.

You can monitor current TPS and network metrics on our Stellar Network Analytics Dashboard, which shows real-time ledger data.

How They're Getting There

The path to ~5000 TPS involves several optimizations:

Consensus Layer Improvements:

Horizon Infrastructure:

For a deeper analysis of how these changes affect API integrations, see our post on how Stellar's 5000 TPS roadmap impacts your API integrations.

What Developers Should Do

Pillar 2: Stellar RPC Unification

The Rebrand

Soroban RPC is becoming Stellar RPC. This isn't just a name change—it represents a fundamental shift in how developers access network data. We covered this transition in detail in our post on the Soroban to Stellar RPC rebrand.

What Changes

Before (two interfaces):

After (clear separation):

How to Use Stellar RPC

Learn to query real-time blockchain data using Stellar RPC in our hands-on guide: Using the Stellar RPC to Access Real-Time Blockchain Data.

Key RPC methods every developer should know:

# Check network health
curl -X POST https://rpc.lumenquery.io \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"getHealth","id":1}'

# Get latest ledger
curl -X POST https://rpc.lumenquery.io \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"getLatestLedger","id":1}'

# Simulate a transaction before submitting
curl -X POST https://rpc.lumenquery.io \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"simulateTransaction","id":1,
       "params":{"transaction":"AAAAAgAA..."}}'

LumenQuery provides managed access to both Horizon and Stellar RPC. See our API documentation for the full endpoint reference.

Pillar 3: State Archival Improvements

The Problem

Every smart contract on Stellar stores data (state) that validators must maintain. As more contracts are deployed, state bloat becomes a concern—it slows down validators and increases costs.

The Solution

SDF's state archival strategy involves:

Impact on Developers

If you're building Soroban smart contracts, you need to understand state archival:

Our Soroban Smart Contracts Explorer documentation explains the three storage types (persistent, temporary, instance) and when to use each.

Pillar 4: Developer Experience

SDK Improvements

SDF is investing in better SDKs across multiple languages:

Tooling

The developer toolchain is expanding:

Grant Programs

SDF continues to fund ecosystem development through:

Read more about these initiatives in our post on how Stellar is expanding the developer ecosystem.

Timeline: Key 2026 Milestones

How to Prepare Your Applications

1. Start Using Stellar RPC

Begin migrating from Soroban RPC to Stellar RPC now. LumenQuery supports both endpoints during the transition:

# LumenQuery Horizon API (historical data)
curl https://api.lumenquery.io/ledgers?limit=5

# LumenQuery Stellar RPC (real-time state)
curl -X POST https://rpc.lumenquery.io \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"getLatestLedger","id":1}'

2. Monitor Network Changes

Use our Analytics Dashboard to track protocol upgrades and network metrics. When the protocol version increments, check for new features.

3. Test Against Realistic Conditions

Our Natural Language Query Interface lets you explore live network data to understand transaction patterns and asset flows.

4. Stay Updated

Follow these resources to stay informed:

Related reading: