The Stellar Development Foundation launched the Adapter upgrade, also known as Protocol 28, on the mainnet on Sept. 17 after a scheduled upgrade vote. The developer-focused release includes CAP-85 tools for atomic updates across groups of Soroban smart contracts, CAP-86 sparse-map functions for gradual data migrations, and CAP-83 consensus changes intended to help validators process heavier traffic more efficiently. Stellar had averaged more than 211 transactions per second across 100 consecutive blocks, a sustained-throughput record that should not be attributed solely to Protocol 28 because parallel transaction-set downloading is only gradually being enabled. The upgrade comes as stablecoin supply on Stellar nears $884 million, DeFi total value locked stands at about $294 million after reaching roughly $319 million in August, and tokenized real-world-asset market capitalization reaches about $3.3 billion, according to the existing coverage. XLM rose about 4% over 24 hours to $0.1863 before retreating toward $0.18, without evidence linking the move to the upgrade. Adoption of the new contract-management features remains optional, leaving developer and validator uptake as the next test for the network.