By
Svetlana Soroka
April 5th, 2024
Soroban will go through several test nets before launching in early 2023.
Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has introduced a new funding initiative to encourage developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform, which officially went live on Futurenet on Oct. 11.
The new funding initiative, according to SDF, a nonprofit organization supporting the development of the Stellar network, aims to draw more developers to the network at a time when demand for Web3 developers and researchers is outpacing supply by a significant margin.
Although several crypto firms have cut off workers amid the bear market, demand for talent remains high and is gradually decoupling from short-term market trends.
Stellar Development Foundation stated that the Soroban smart contract platform brings Turing-complete smart contracts to the Stellar blockchain, enabling developers to build new financial services rails on the network.
Tomer Weller, the vice president of technology strategy at SDF, explained that Soroban was created to overcome the “friction” of other blockchain networks.
“When we looked at what was out there in the market today, the smart contract landscape is predominantly made up of solutions that are patchworked together, peppered with varying quality of tooling, hard to implement, and to top it all off, pretty expensive. It made us want to build something better,” he stated.
Developers can start experimenting with the smart contract platform now that Soroban has gone live on Futurenet and has the ability to reward them for their efforts.
The foundation has set aside $100 million to encourage the use of Soroban, and the first incentive program will seek input by identifying GitHub issues, providing code examples, as well as providing lessons.
Although Soroban will go through several test nets before launching in early 2023, it has already been designed with ease of use and simplicity in mind, Weller added.
Founded in 2014, the Stellar Network initially focused on cross-border payment initiatives. The network has since processed 2 billion operations since its inception.
Around 7.2 million users are actively using the Stellar Network, with roughly $3.4 billion worth of its native Stellar (XLM) tokens in circulation. CLM currently has an average daily trading volume of $96.44M across several crypto exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, Qumas Ai, Binance and others.
XLM is currently 25th on the crypto ladder and down by 0.90% in the last seven days. The coin has however outperformed some major altcoins within that same period including Cardano, Solana, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Polygon, and Polkadot.