Stellar Development Foundation leaders discuss Soroban smart contracts launch, addressing past skepticism, scalability concerns, and the $100M Sorobanathon First Light developer fund. Soroban launches Q2 2023 with two execution lanes preserving low-cost Classic payments.
SDF leadership including David Mazieres and Danelle Dixon discuss Soroban smart contracts, which represent a major shift after years of internal resistance. They explain how Soroban was built from scratch by skeptics, leveraging second-mover advantage to avoid other chains' mistakes. The platform maintains Stellar Classic operations while adding a separate smart contract execution layer, ensuring payments remain low-cost and unclogged. A $100M Sorobanathon First Light program funds early developers and tinkerers. Key design decisions include WebAssembly for extensibility, concurrent execution for scalability, and no rollback mechanism beyond governance. Mainnet launch targets Q2 2023 with FutureNet incentivized testnets beforehand. The team emphasizes equitable access, avoiding gating smart contracts, and letting wallets and third parties handle reputation systems rather than SDF.