The implementation of smart contracts on the Stellar network has been announced by the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), which says this will usher in “a new era” for its technology stack.
The SDF announced in a statement on February 20 that the “Protocol 20” upgrade was successfully implemented by Stellar network validators, allowing additional smart contract capabilities and starting the gradual implementation of its Soroban smart contract platform.
The goal of Stellar smart contracts is to give WebAssembly and Rust programmers a more intuitive development environment.
The scalability of Soroban, a smart contract platform that was initially introduced to the Stellar testnet in October 2022, is facilitated by features like autonomous resource pricing and predictable costs.
According to Stellar, developers will be able to create new decentralized applications (DApps) and create innovative protocols and other apps on the network thanks to its smart contracts ecosystem.
The SDF first postponed the eagerly predicted smart contract mainnet upgrade in January when one of its teams discovered a Stellar Core problem. When the smart contract platform was launched, the company stated that although there was “little risk” associated with the flaw, it might affect some applications.
In October 2022, the SDF announced a $100 million fundraising campaign to entice developers to create applications using the Soroban smart contract platform.
The nonprofit group known as the SDF, which is in charge of building the Stellar network, stated in a blog post that it has been working with the Stellar community to develop smart contract features for the past two years.
According to Cointelegraph Markets data, the network’s native Stellar coin, which is presently trading for $0.116, has dropped 1% in the last 24 hours after failing to gain traction following the announcement.
XLM has lagged behind the 2024 cryptocurrency market upswing and is still down 87% from its all-time high of $0.875, which it reached in January 2018.
