The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has made an exciting announcement regarding the implementation of smart contracts on the Stellar network. This development is expected to mark the beginning of a new era for the SDF’s tech stack.
According to a statement released on February 20th, the SDF revealed that the Stellar network validators have successfully introduced the “Protocol 20” upgrade. This update enables the integration of new smart contract capabilities and initiates the phased rollout of the Soroban smart contract platform.
The introduction of Stellar smart contracts aims to enhance the developer experience for users of the Rust and WebAssembly languages. The Soroban platform, which was first deployed on the Stellar testnet in October 2022, incorporates features designed for scalability, such as predictable fees and independent resource pricing.
The SDF highlighted that the smart contracts ecosystem on Stellar will facilitate the development of decentralized applications (DApps). Builders will now be able to create innovative protocols and other applications on the network.
Initially, the long-awaited smart contract mainnet upgrade faced delays in January due to the discovery of a bug in Stellar Core. Although the SDF reassured that the bug posed minimal risk, it could have potentially affected applications once the smart contract platform was launched.
To encourage developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform, the SDF launched a $100 million funding initiative in October 2022.
Despite this significant development, the announcement did not have a substantial impact on the price of the native Stellar (XLM) token. Over the past 24 hours, XLM has experienced a 1% decrease, currently trading at $0.116, according to Cointelegraph Markets data.
XLM has struggled to keep up with the 2024 crypto market rally and remains 87% below its all-time high of $0.875 in January 2018.
Source: Cointelegraph