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- The Stellar Development Foundation is investigating proposals for the deployment of smart contracts on the XLM blockchain.
- An improved scalability of the blockchain Stellar Lumens will be one of the most important goals for 2021 in order to satisfy the growing user base.
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has presented a report on the growth and main achievements of the network in 2020. Expanding to more than 10 countries, with significant staff growth, the SDF focused on hosting new use cases for the Stellar Lumens blockchain to bring services and value “to the real world” over last year.
The CEO of the SDF, Danielle Dixon, also shared the strategy they will apply to ensure that the achievements of the past year are prolonged and expanded further in 2021. Dixon emphasized “3 strategic pillars”: hosting sustainable use cases, ensuring that Stellar is a robust network, and working to gain user’s trust.
Dixon indicated that the SDF has concrete goals for each of the pillars. First, the robustness of the Stellar network will be strengthened by supporting and categorizing the main use cases operating on the platform. Stellar aims to accomplish this by “responding to their technical needs” with network proposals and making “necessary” changes to the Stellar ecosystem’s client-facing API server, known as Horizon. SDF’s CEO said:
We will continue to consider those needs (of the use cases) as we work with other participants in the ecosystem and as more and more of these use cases are developed.
SDF will also focus on improving the liquidity for the Stellar-based decentralized exchange (DEX). Dixon said the community has consistently called for improvement on this point, so she said “we are listening to them”. SDF will give higher priority to improving the user experience with the DEX.
In this sense, the DEX could be the beginning of the development of a DeFi ecosystem on the Stellar Lumens blockchain. With the trend of smart contracts being developed on top of the XRP Ledger, Cardano, IOTA and other DLTs, Dixon has stated that Stellar could follow suit:
We already have several proposals from the ecosystem on how to integrate smart contracts and how and wether we should integrate automated market makers. We want to explore these options and consider whether other changes should be proposed. This is one of our top priorities for 2021.
Stellar Lumens will scale to adapt to new use cases
As Dixon also revealed, the growth of Stellar use cases is creating increased demand on the network. As a result, the SDF will “ensure” that the blockchain can scale to handle the “growing” volume of use cases and users. Dixon celebrated the completion of the development of the private ledger Sidenet:
This is the culmination of several projects in which we have worked with the community historically. We will put this together as a second layer technology in preparation for new integrations and use cases. Expect to see more of that this year.
In the United States, the SDF will be advocating for policies and regulations favorable to the crypto and blockchain industry. Thus, Stellar Lumens will become “more widely known” in U.S. policy and will take an active role in promoting stability within its own backyard.
Another relevant issue for the last pillar in Stellar’s development strategy will be the attraction of more participants to the network with the enterprise fund. Similarly, SDF aims to build new relationships with consulting firms that are close to governments and financial institutions to gain allies in driving the network integration with Stellar Lumens.
