What is Whisk? Exploring The Stellar Network’s Latest Protocol 23 Upgrade

Protocol 23 introduces eight different Core Advancement Protocols (CAPs) which are meant to make Stellar faster, cheaper, and more scalable for users and developers.

Parallelism

The CAPs address a variety of network technicals that affect developers and validators, ranging from the Stellar smart contract’s state data storage to the introduction of parallelism, or parallel smart contract execution.

Parallel execution means that transactions are processed simultaneously, as opposed to sequential execution – used by most existing blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum – in which one transaction must be executed in order for the next to begin. The network design has grown in popularity over the last two years thanks to blockchains like Sei and Monad.

Stellar smart contracts were designed for parallelism, but thanks to Whisk’s CAP-0063, validators will be able to predictably distribute parallel vs sequential transactions.

Budding DeFi on Stellar

Stellar has grown tremendously over the last two years, with the chain’s total value locked (TVL) surging by more than 20x since the beginning of 2024, and nearly 3x in 2025, driven largely by the launch of Soroban smart contracts and the chain’s real-world asset (RWA) ecosystem.

Stellar Network TVL - DeFiLlama

Protocol 23 will make the developer experience more versatile and streamlined, potentially opening the door to new developments and DeFi innovations on Stellar.

So far RWA’s have been a huge contributor to Stellar’s success. The network hosts Franklin Templton’s BENJI money market fund, which accounts for $497 million of institutional-backed capital. Thanks to BENJI, as well as Circle’s USDC and WisdomTree’s money market fund, Stellar Network is the fifth largest chain by RWA value in all of DeFi according to RWA.xyz.

RWA’s and institutional adoption of DeFi have become a major narrative over the last few years, with the RWA market capitalization reaching new highs every month, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announcing their “Project Crypto” last month with the goal to bring all of finance onchain.

While the competition is stiff, there is more than enough capital to go around and plenty of room for smart contract chains outside of Ethereum and Solana to become powerhouses in the institutional DeFi race. Read more about the Whisk upgrade here.