A protocol that levels up

Everything you have studied — SCP, path payments, Soroban, ZK host functions — arrived in numbered protocol versions, and new ones keep coming.

Upgrades on Stellar are not chaotic hard forks. Validators vote: when enough of the network agrees, the upgrade activates at a chosen ledger and every node steps forward together. One network before, one network after.

That is SCP doing double duty — the same consensus that agrees on transactions also agrees on the rules themselves. A blockchain is software; this one ships releases like it knows it.