The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has made an exciting announcement about the introduction of smart contracts on the Stellar network, which is expected to mark the beginning of a new era for its technology. In a statement released on February 20, the SDF revealed that the Stellar network validators successfully implemented the “Protocol 20” upgrade, which enables the use of smart contracts and initiates the phased launch of the Soroban smart contract platform.
The introduction of Stellar smart contracts aims to provide developers using the Rust and WebAssembly languages with a more user-friendly experience. The Soroban platform, which was first deployed on the Stellar testnet in October 2022, incorporates scalability features such as predictable fees and independent resource pricing.
According to Stellar, the smart contracts ecosystem will empower the development of decentralized applications (DApps) and enable builders to create innovative protocols and other applications on the network.
The deployment of the smart contract mainnet upgrade was initially postponed by the SDF in January due to the discovery of a bug in Stellar Core. Although the bug was deemed to pose minimal risk, the SDF decided to address it before rolling out the smart contract platform to ensure the smooth operation of applications.
In October 2022, the SDF launched a $100 million funding initiative to encourage developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform.
The SDF, a nonprofit organization responsible for the development of the Stellar network, stated that it has been working on smart contract functionality for the past two years in collaboration with the Stellar community.
Despite this significant development, the native token of the Stellar network, Stellar (XLM), did not experience a surge in price. In fact, it has declined by 1% in the past 24 hours and is currently valued at $0.116, according to Cointelegraph Markets data. XLM has struggled to keep up with the market rally in 2024 and remains 87% below its all-time high of $0.875 in January 2018.
It is clear that the SDF’s deployment of smart contracts on the Stellar network is a significant milestone for the platform. However, the impact on the price of XLM remains to be seen.