The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has announced the long-awaited launch of its Stellar smart contracts after 16 months of development on the testnet.
In a release published on February 20 on its website, the platform highlighted the successful rollout of the “Protocol 20” upgrade by the Stellar network validators. This upgrade will introduce new smart contract capabilities and pave the way for the phased rollout of the Soroban, the project’s smart contract platform.
The announcement was also made on the Stellar team’s X account the same day. According to their post, the full rollout will consist of three phases: Phase 0 for rock-solid stability, Phase 1 for rigorous testing, and Phase 2 for full-scale production.
These Stellar smart contracts are expected to offer a more user-friendly developer experience for developers utilizing WebAssembly and Rust languages.
Initially deployed in October 2022, the Soroban smart contract introduces scalability features such as independent resource pricing and predictable fees to the blockchain network. In the same month, the SDF launched a $100 million funding initiative to incentivize network developers to begin development on the Soroban platform.
Over the past two years, the SDF and the Stellar community have collaborated to design, discuss, and develop new functionalities to advance the platform and the Stellar ecosystem. The team noted that via these collaborative efforts, they have iterated on more than ten releases openly and designed novel concepts to address some of the most significant unresolved issues in the blockchain.
The mainnet upgrade for Stellar’s smart contracts encountered delays due to the discovery of a bug in the blockchain’s code in January.
The SDF alerted the ecosystem to the bug in the Stellar Core v20.1.0, which could impact applications and services using fee bumps for Soroban transfers during the Mainnet transition to Protocol 20.
While the team noted that the bug posed minimal risk, it could have posed significant challenges for applications once the smart contract platform went live.
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