The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has finally launched smart contracts on the Stellar network after 16 months of testing. This deployment marks what the SDF describes as the beginning of “a new era” for its technology stack.
On February 20, the SDF announced the successful introduction of the “Protocol 20” upgrade by Stellar network validators. This upgrade enables new smart contract capabilities and initiates the phased rollout of the Soroban smart contract platform.
Stellar's Protocol 20 is officially live, bringing smart contracts to Stellar Mainnet!
We've laid the groundwork, hitting major milestones along the way; but this is just the beginning:
Phase 0⃣ for rock-solid stability ✅
Phase 1⃣ for rigorous testing
Phase 2⃣ for… pic.twitter.com/Zq0FDYU6fd— Stellar (@StellarOrg) February 20, 2024
The Soroban platform, which was first deployed to the Stellar testnet in October 2022, is designed with scalability features like predictable fees and independent resource pricing.
According to Stellar, the introduction of smart contracts aims to improve the developer experience for those using Rust and WebAssembly languages. The smart contracts ecosystem on Stellar will facilitate the development of decentralized applications (DApps), empowering builders to create innovative protocols and applications on the network.
The rollout of the long-awaited smart contract mainnet upgrade faced delays in January due to a bug discovered in Stellar Core. Although the bug was deemed to pose “little risk,” the SDF decided to postpone the upgrade to ensure the stability of applications once the smart contract platform was deployed.
In October 2022, the SDF initiated a $100 million funding program to incentivize developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform.
Over the past two years, the SDF, along with the Stellar community, has been actively developing smart contract functionality.
Despite the introduction of smart contracts, the native Stellar XLM token has not experienced significant price movement, decreasing by 1% over the past 24 hours and currently trading at $0.113, according to data from Cointelegraph.
XLM has struggled to keep pace with the broader crypto market rally in 2024 and remains down by 87% from its all-time high of $0.875 in January 2018.
