Stellar, the global payments facilitator, recently announced its roadmap for the year 2022, with its biggest highlight being the arrival of smart contracts to the platform by the end of this year.
Multiple smart contract platforms including Solana and Cardano registered notable gains over the past year, charting significant growth and thus strengthening the narrative behind the smart contract technology. The team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has taken cognisance of this fact and recently announced via a blog post the likely debut of smart contracts on the Stellar (XLM) blockchain by the end of 2022.
Smart contracts expected to boost innovation on Stellar
In a video posted on the SDF blog, Justin Rice, Stellar’s VP of Ecosystem shared the network’s plan to onboard smart contracts as they are capable of empowering the ecosystem and creating more room for innovation. As Stellar stays focused on being one of the most accessible blockchain platforms for the developers, its team believes that smart contracts’ integration will enable the network to adapt and respond to the continuously evolving blockchain landscape.
Quoting verbatim from the post, “Bringing smart contracts to Stellar is not a departure from the values or vision of the network. Since the Stellar network was built for the future of payments, it’s critical that smart contracts on Stellar are secure for users and can scale without exorbitant network fees. If done right, this could set smart contracts on Stellar apart from the rest.”
Tom Weller, the VP of Tech Strategy at Stellar highlighted the platform’s DeFi ecosystem through a series of tweets. He underlined the fact that DeFi constitutes an integral part of Stellar and has always been the protocol’s core. For the uninitiated, Stellar network besides supporting the issuance and movement of digital assets, also functions as a decentralised distributed exchange (DEX) which facilitates easy trading and conversion of digital assets. Weller further mentioned that while DEX was always built-into Stellar, the AMM (Automated Market Maker) functionality was implemented in 2021.
MoneyGram became the latest player to join hands with Stellar. The collaboration will support hassle-free crypto-to-cash conversions in 300,000 locations across the world.
While these developments augur well for the network’s overall growth, it remains to be seen how they’ll impact XLM’s price action going forward.
Stellar (XLM) was exchanging hands at $0.20 per coin at the time of writing this report, having appreciated by 4.94% over the past 24 hours.
XLM/USD Daily Chart: Source: TradingView
Looking at the XLM/USD daily chart above, it’s clear that the coin has recently emerged from the oversold territory, with the RSI at 36 as of writing. MACD indicator is also making a push upwards and is just about to cross the signal line, offering some ray of hope to the bulls.
