Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) reportedly completed the release of a new funding project to encourage developers to design on the Soroban smart contract platform – officially live on Futurenet. 

Specifically, Soroban brings Turing-complete smart contracts to the Stellar blockchain, making it possible for developers to design new financial services rails on the network. 

Tomer Weller, SDF’s vice president of technology strategy, further claimed that Soroban was built with a goal of overcoming the “friction” of other blockchain networks.

“When we looked at what was out there in the market today, the smart contract landscape is predominantly made up of solutions that are patchworked together, peppered with varying quality of tooling, hard to implement, and to top it all off, pretty expensive. It made us want to build something better.”

With Soroban going live on Futurenet, engineers can start running tests for the smart contract platform and potentially receive rewards for doing so. 

The foundation has dedicated $100 million to financially assist Soroban adoption, with the first incentive program soliciting feedback via code examples, tutorials and identifying GitHub issues.

Per SDF, the new funding project is built with a purpose of reeling in extra builders to the Stellar network at a time when competition for Web3 developers and researchers is far outpacing the available supply. 

Regardless of the fact that numerous crypto companies have let their employees go during bearish movements in the market, demand for talent remains high and is gradually decoupling from short-term market trends.

As far as blockchain projects are concerned, Stellar is among the oldest and most established, having been founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb. Before Stellar, McCaleb founded Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox and was the co-creator of Ripple.