The Stellar Development Foundation has set up a $100 million fund to help people adopt the Stellar Network-based platform.
A press release on Tuesday said that the smart-contract platform Soroban has launched on the Stellar network with the help of a $100 million fund.
The Soroban Adoption Fund gives $100 million from the Stellar Development Foundation to developers who build tools and products for the Soroban ecosystem. This is done through incentive programs like Sorobanathon: First Light, which pays developers for testing Soroban and sharing feedback, code examples, and tutorials. The goal of the incentive program is to help the platform get closer to being able to offer smart contracts with lower-than-average gas fees that are more cost-effective.
Tomer Weller, vice president of tech strategy at the Stellar Development Foundation, says that the platform plans to offer smart contract fees that are lower than those of their competitors by making transactions easier and using less computing power to process them.
Weller told CoinDesk, “We’ve really optimized the contracts so that you don’t have to constantly serialize and deserialize information, which wastes a lot of computing power.”
The people who made the platform also came up with a way to charge fees that are based on how much computing power is used to process a transaction.
Weller said, “We made a fee model that you can tune because, in other ecosystems, the fees don’t always match the amount of computing power.” “So sometimes you have two contracts that both cost the same. One of them is much more expensive to compute than the other.”
Soroban, which is now live on Futurenet, has asked developers to play around with its Rust-based smart contract service. Weller says that even though the platform will go through several test nets before it goes live in early 2023, it has already been made to be easy to use and simple.
Weller said, “Our development environment is really all set up for you, so you have this local sandbox that’s easy to set up on your computer.” “These contracts and host functions are pretty much built-in, so you don’t have to invent the wheel.”
Since its start in 2014, when it was created, the Stellar Network has handled 2 billion transactions. In its early years, the platform was mostly used for making payments across borders.
Stellar Network has about 7.2 million active users, and its native Stellar (XLM) tokens, worth about $3.4 billion, are in circulation.
