sd-008: The Software Versions page still presents Protocol 27 as Testnet-only after Mainnet activation

[kalepail]

Finding

The Software Versions page still presents Protocol 27 as Testnet-only after Mainnet activation.

It retains Protocol 26 as the latest Mainnet section after Stellar Mainnet activated Protocol 27.
It also leaves the P27 Smart
Contract Rust SDK and Stellar CLI rows as TBD after stable v27.0.0 releases became available.

This is not a network ambiguity. The adjacent live Horizon ledgers show the exact transition:
ledger 63386818 closed under Protocol 26 at 2026-07-08 17:00:05 UTC, and ledger 63386819 closed
under Protocol 27 at 17:00:10 UTC. Independent RPC/protocol-history checks agree.

Evidence

On 2026-07-09, https://horizon.stellar.org/ reported current_protocol_version: 27, and
https://horizon.stellar.org/ledgers/63386819 reported protocol_version: 27. The official SDF
Zipper upgrade guide had scheduled the Mainnet vote for July 8, matching the observed boundary.

The live Software Versions page still rendered headings for Protocol 27 (Testnet, June 18, 2026) and Protocol 26 (Mainnet, May 6, 2026), with no P27 Mainnet section. Its P27 table listed
the Smart Contract Rust SDK and Stellar CLI as TBD, while the GitHub release APIs returned stable
rs-soroban-sdk v27.0.0 and stellar-cli v27.0.0 releases.

The lag created expired golden traps across the QA corpus: a current, network-grounded answer that
correctly said P27 was live would have been punished by several stale avoid clauses. Those local
goldens were corrected through the golden-truth workflow; the upstream page remains the source of
future agent confusion.

A focused eight-case QA smoke after the local correction measured the consumer impact. Five answers
were wrong and three partial. Docs-backed answers repeatedly called Protocol 26 current, treated the
July 8 vote as unconfirmed, omitted the P27 history tail, or denied that CAP-0071 delegation was a
protocol feature; the two partial release answers found v27 facts but missed either activation or
the live release tag. The one SDK/CLI answer that recovered both stable v27.0.0 versions still lacked
the durable release-feed freshness caveat. Manual review found no judge artifacts in the eight
verdicts: this is upstream truth/discoverability drift plus downstream synthesis, not a score-only
regression.

Additional recorded evidence:

• live Horizon first-activation boundary rechecked 2026-07-09: ledger 63386818 closed at 2026-07-08T17:00:05Z under Protocol 26; ledger 63386819 closed at 17:00:10Z under Protocol 27
• developers.stellar.org Software Versions fetched 2026-07-09 still heads Protocol 27 as "Testnet, June 18, 2026" and Protocol 26 as "Mainnet, May 6, 2026"
• stellar/rs-soroban-sdk latest release API rechecked 2026-07-09: v27.0.0, prerelease false, published 2026-07-08T19:48:45Z; the P27 table still lists Smart Contract Rust SDK and Stellar CLI as TBD
• eval/qa/results/2026-07-09T19-25-25-variantA.json (8-case post-vote P27 smoke: 0 correct / 3 partial / 5 wrong; every verdict manually reviewed)

Recommendation

Add a Protocol 27 (Mainnet, July 8, 2026) section (or update the existing P27 heading so both
Testnet and Mainnet activation dates are explicit), populate the stable Rust SDK and CLI versions,
and keep Testnet-vs-Mainnet support rows unambiguous. If the page intentionally tracks a curated
support matrix rather than the newest patch release, say so and link the live GitHub release feeds.

Source Record

This was found by the downstream Raven eval/improvements loop and recorded as sd-008 (stellar-docs, discovered 2026-07-09). Public record: https://github.com/kalepail/stellar-raven/blob/main/improvements/stellar-docs/sd-008-protocol-27-mainnet-status-lag.md