Stellar Development Foundation Launches New Account Model, How Users Will Benefit

Via an official blog post, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced a new account model called Muxed. Created to remove friction and facilitate user interaction with the account model based on this network, and the multiple services build on top of it, the Muxed accounts seem to be an important improvement for the entire ecosystem.

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According to the post, a Muxed account is one that combines the GABC and 64-bit integer ID to create a “virtual” account under a traditional address. Due to its characteristics, a muxed account can be identified within a real account.

Thus, if there is a service or product using Stellar to pool multiple accounts, they can now manage them with more ease and will be able to eliminate burdensome issues, such as meme problems. The SDF has called on “products and services built on Stellar” to check if the validators are compatible with the new account model and asked them to “come up with a plan to implement” muxed accounts into their system. The organization said:

Custodial services generally use muxed accounts to map incoming payments to an internal customer database. Businesses may use muxed accounts to map incoming payments to an invoice or customer account.

Other characteristics for muxed accounts, as revealed by the SBF, are the differences in its encoding, they will be 69 characters long and not 56 as a traditional account, and in their base values. As a result, Muxed accounts will have M as their first character rather than G.

Per its GitHub repository, Stellar’s new account model could open more possibilities for the users, and all actors operating on this network and could finally remove the limitations of using a memo-based model:

Experience shows that people frequently forget to include the memo ID, resulting in either lost funds or onerous support calls. Moreover, memo IDs are per transaction, not per occurrence of an account ID, which imposes restrictions on the use of multiplexed accounts. (…) By adding an optional memo ID to the account ID type, we make multiplexed (Muxed) accounts a first-class abstraction that can be used anywhere a normal account ID can be used.

This could significantly improve the way exchanges and custodial services operate with Stellar transactions, and users will save time and money as they will no longer need to manually participate in a transaction. The SBF revealed that muxed accounts was implemented in the Protocol 13 update.

This update was introduced in 2020, but muxed accounts remained hidden until yesterday, January 10th, 2022. Due to its incompatibility with older versions of the Stellar software, projects on this network were given time to update and adjust to the new model.

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As of press time, XLM trades at $0.22 with sideways movement in the 4-hour chart, as seen below.