The Vice President of Tech Strategy at the Stellar Development Foundation, Tomer Weller announced that in 2022 the protocol plans to support the development of smart contracts.
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Stellar is a decentralized payments technology that provides cross-border transfers between any pairs of currencies. With the addition of smart contracts, the network will present more DeFi opportunities. In a Twitter thread, Weller mentioned that smart contracts will make the space more accessible and enable developers to build new trust-minimized functionality.
1/ Smart Contracts are coming to Stellar! I’ll be on twitter spaces with @StellarZac tmrw @12pm PT to discuss https://t.co/tLts08KxnN. Thread 👇
— Tomer Weller (@tomerweller) January 26, 2022
In 2021, Stellar presented decentralized exchange and AMM functionalities.
The upgrade will allow Stellar access to the on-ramp and off-ramp activities. Stellar partners with MoneyGram to deliver crypto-to-cash conversions in 300.000 locations in the world.
Stellar is exploring the options for languages to write smart contracts, both from existing and developing its language. As for the date of release, Stellar executive said that the team aims for a feature-complete test network by the end of 2022.
Later, the ecosystem will decide if and when to turn on smart contracts on the mainnet.
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Stellar has a native token XLM, which currently trades at $0.19. XLM has a market cap of over $4.9 billion.