According to PANews, the public chain Stellar announced that it will upgrade to introduce smart contract functions, which is planned to be launched in phases in the first half of 2024. The network validator vote will be held on January 30. The team said that to ensure that this launch provides a high-quality experience for developers, Stellar will evaluate the trial contract deployment and communicate with developers when the smart contract platform (called Soroban) reaches a user-ready transaction level per second.