The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has recently unveiled its latest development in the Stellar network, which it believes will mark the beginning of a new era for its technology. According to a statement released on February 20, the SDF announced that the Stellar network validators have successfully implemented the “Protocol 20” upgrade. This upgrade introduces new smart contract capabilities and initiates the phased launch of the Soroban smart contract platform.
The introduction of smart contracts on the Stellar network aims to enhance the developer experience for users of the Rust and WebAssembly programming languages. Soroban, the smart contract platform that was first tested on the Stellar testnet in October 2022, incorporates features that promote scalability, such as predictable fees and independent resource pricing.
Stellar has expressed its belief that the smart contracts ecosystem will facilitate the development of decentralized applications (DApps), enabling builders to create innovative protocols and other applications on the network.
The deployment of the long-awaited smart contract mainnet upgrade was initially delayed by the SDF in January due to a bug discovered in Stellar Core. Although the bug was deemed to pose little risk, it had the potential to impact applications once the smart contract platform was rolled out.
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 native token of the Stellar network, XLM, has not experienced a surge in value. In fact, it has fallen by 1% in the past 24 hours, currently trading at $0.116, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets. XLM has lagged behind in the 2024 crypto market rally, remaining 87% down from its all-time high of $0.875 in January 2018.