The Stellar Development Foundation announced Project Jump Cannon will use WebAssembly (WASM) as its smart contract runtime. After evaluating EVM, Move, eBPF, and other options, the SDF chose WASM for its robust execution environment, thriving ecosystem, and alignment with Stellar's values of safety, scalability, and equitable access.
The Stellar Development Foundation has decided to build Project Jump Cannon, Stellar's native smart contracts platform, on a WebAssembly (WASM) runtime. The SDF team conducted a comprehensive evaluation of smart contract technologies including EVM, Move, and eBPF, assessing each against criteria like capability, design, performance, maturity, and ecosystem strength. While EVM dominates DeFi, its storage and execution models are expensive and hard to parallelize. Move is well-designed but immature and slow. WASM emerged as the best fit, offering a robust execution environment, wide language support, strong performance, and minimal coupling to specific blockchain semantics. The decision aligns with Stellar's commitment to safety, scalability, and equitable access. The SDF will now address remaining questions about WASM implementation, source languages, storage models, and protocol interoperability.
