The Stellar Development Foundation has announced the integration of smart contracts into the Stellar network, which is expected to help initiate a new era for the blockchain ecosystem. In a statement made on February 20th, the foundation shared that Stellar network validators have successfully introduced Protocol 20 upgrade, enabling new smart contract capabilities and initiating the phased rollout of the Soroban smart contract platform.
Significant Step in the Stellar Ecosystem
Stellar smart contracts, which utilize Rust and WASM (WebAssembly), aim to provide a more user-friendly developer experience. The smart contract platform Soroban, initially deployed to the Stellar test network in October 2022, employs features such as predictable fees and independent resource pricing for scalability.
Stellar writes that the smart contracts ecosystem will enable the development of new decentralized applications (DApps) and allow developers to create new protocols and other applications on the network.
The long-awaited smart contract mainnet upgrade was postponed by the Stellar Development Foundation in January after a bug was discovered in Stellar Core. At that time, the firm stated that the bug posed minimal risk but could potentially affect applications when the smart contract platform was rolled out.
What’s Happening on the Stellar Front?
The Stellar Development Foundation took a significant step in this field by launching a $100 million funding initiative in October 2022 to encourage developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform. However, user interest in the Web3 space has not yet intensified, and the Stellar ecosystem continues to lag behind.
The nonprofit organization responsible for the development of the Stellar network, the Stellar Development Foundation, wrote that it has been working on smart contract functionality with the Stellar community for the past two years. According to Tradingview data, the network’s native token XLM did not gain an increase following the announcement, dropping 2.71% in the last 24 hours to trade at $0.1147 at the time of writing.
XLM continues to lag in the 2024 crypto market rally and is trading significantly below its all-time high of $0.875 seen in January 2018, with a decline of about 87%.
