The post Stellar sparks smart contract upgrade — and it’s not an EVM appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Validators of the Stellar network voted Tuesday to upgrade the Stellar mainnet to “Protocol 20,” which introduces the Soroban smart contract platform. The addition of smart contracts follows years of planning for Stellar — which has been known primarily for payments — as it seeks to compete with a plethora of smart contract ecosystems. The Stellar community aims to differentiate Soroban by emphasizing a combination of its efficiency, focused use cases, and integration with Stellar’s existing infrastructure. Soroban is expected to extend Stellar’s current strengths on cross-border transactions and interoperability between various fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, with support for compliance and regulatory requirements directly within the smart contract layer, making it more appealing for institutional adoption. Originally launched in 2014, Stellar made a name for itself through its native stablecoins, including USDC, and partnership with Moneygram in 2021. The platform was always more than a currency, with many basic building blocks for the payments focus built in, said Tomer Weller, vice president of product at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). “You have things like payments, a decentralized exchange, all the technical minutia — things like multisig, time locks, issuing assets as a first class primitive,” Weller told Blockworks. “One thing that’s kind of been absent is this idea of writing fully custom trust-minimized code.” That’s where smart contracts come in. Playing catch-up or catching narratives? The past year has seen numerous examples of chains that previously launched as their own layer-1 networks, shifting to an Ethereum L2 — think Celo, and more recently Lisk — or of chains adopting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) after once eschewing it, such as Tezos, EOS, XRP and IOTA. With Soroban, Stellar is charting its own course, not jumping on prevailing narratives — it’s neither a layer-2, nor is it using the EVM. “We…

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Filed under: News - @ February 22, 2024 3:10 am