Alvin Lang
Feb 24, 2026 15:12
Stellar (XLM)’s Freighter browser pockets cuts preliminary load time to 1.27 seconds by means of aggressive caching, batch fetching, and smarter asset icon loading.
Stellar (XLM)’s Freighter browser extension pockets now masses in 1.27 seconds after a multi-week optimization effort that reduce startup instances by 63%, in accordance with a technical breakdown revealed by the event crew on February 23.
The enhancements goal a persistent ache level for crypto pockets customers: ready for balances and transaction historical past to seem. For merchants who want fast entry throughout risky market circumstances, each second issues.
What Truly Modified
The Freighter crew recognized exterior API calls as the first bottleneck. The pockets was beforehand fetching account balances, transaction historical past, asset icons, and a number of knowledge streams concurrently at startup—forcing customers to attend for every thing earlier than seeing something.
The repair? Load solely account balances initially, then fetch every thing else within the background. Transaction historical past, asset lists, and icons now load asynchronously after the primary interface renders. This knowledge will get cached, so navigating to the Historical past tab pulls from native storage moderately than triggering recent API calls.
The Asset Icon Drawback
One notably inefficient course of concerned loading asset icons. The previous methodology required three separate community roundtrips per asset: first fetching the issuer’s account from Horizon, then loading the related TOML file, then lastly grabbing the icon URL. Multiply that by each token in a consumer’s pockets.
The brand new strategy checks asset lists first—since standard Stellar tokens are already catalogued—and solely falls again to the multi-step course of when needed. Even then, the crew switched to Stellar RPC’s ledger entries endpoint, which returns a number of asset issuers in a single name as an alternative of iterating by means of them individually.
Aggressive Caching Technique
The pockets now caches primarily every thing till the consumer closes it, with a three-minute staleness threshold triggering automated refreshes. Actions that clearly invalidate cached knowledge—sending funds, including trustlines—set off fast re-fetches moderately than ready for the timer.
For transaction historical past particularly, the crew applied batch fetching to keep away from redundant lookups. Customers incessantly work together with the identical Soroban contracts a number of instances; caching contract knowledge in the course of the first encounter eliminates duplicate API calls when processing subsequent transactions.
Why This Issues
Browser extension efficiency stays a aggressive differentiator as pockets choices multiply. Analysis into extension optimization by means of 2026 emphasizes that content material scripts working pointless code instantly impression perceived pace—precisely what Freighter addressed by deferring non-critical masses.
The 1.27-second goal places Freighter in affordable territory for browser extensions, although customers on slower connections or with in depth transaction histories should still expertise longer waits. The caching enhancements ought to compound over time as extra knowledge will get saved regionally.
Stellar’s native token XLM continues buying and selling amid broader market circumstances, with the pockets enhancements probably lowering friction for customers actively managing positions on the community.
Picture supply: Shutterstock
