Stellar (XLM) Enters New Era With Protocol 20 Upgrade, Here's What Changed

Stellar (XLM) has entered a new era in its evolution following the launch of the Protocol 20 upgrade on the mainnet. With this new upgrade, Soroban smart contracts capabilities are now enabled, pitching Stellar as a blockchain that can host smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps).

Stellar Soroban onboarding

Stellar started as a blockchain tailored for payments and, since its inception, it has advanced its reach across the board with this new feature set to establish its influence in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. With the evolution of blockchain and Web3, this pivot is crucial and might make Stellar capture a bigger part of the crypto market currently dominated by protocols like Cardano (ADA).

The Stellar Network described the Protocol 20 emergence as the most transformative upgrade that has ever been implemented on the blockchain. Notably, the Soroban smart contract capabilities have not been completely rolled out yet, as this will be done in phases ranging from 0 to 2.

The rollout is currently in Phase 0, marked by stability testing. At Phase 0, the ledger capacity for Soroban transactions starts low and will soon be increased in Phase 1, where applications can begin deploying and testing on mainnet.

In Phase 2 of the Soroban rollout, it will become user-ready and smart contracts capacity will continually be increased to boost its scalability. The Stellar network, however, did not unveil the timeline for the release of these phases.

Stellar (XLM) price in mix

The price of Stellar is on a rebound path following the news of the Soroban smart contracts capabilities. At the time of writing, the price of XLM was changing hands at $0.1149, up by 3.3% in the past 24 hours.

Investors are largely scampering toward the coin, as showcased in the 20% boost in trading volume to $119,262,381. The projection is that with smart contract enablement, XLM will find more ingrained use cases and start competing with other assets like Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), both of which are on a massive run at this time.