Stellar Development Foundation announces Project Jump Cannon, a research initiative to bring native smart contracts to Stellar. SDF explains why the network initially avoided smart contracts and why ecosystem growth now demands this capability while maintaining Stellar's core values of safety, scalability, and equitable access.
The Stellar Development Foundation has announced Project Jump Cannon, an R&D initiative to develop native on-chain smart contracts for the Stellar network. In a transparent blog post, SDF explains that while the original decision to avoid smart contracts was correct for Stellar's early mission as a lean, efficient payments network, the ecosystem has matured enough to benefit from smart contract functionality. The announcement comes after the successful rollout of automated market maker (AMM) functionality revealed that protocol-level changes alone cannot sustain network innovation. SDF plans to implement smart contracts with emphasis on safety through developer tooling and audit grants, scalability through parallelism-first design, and equitable access aligned with Stellar's financial inclusion mission. The project is named after astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, whose cataloging work advanced stellar classification.
