Finally, the big upgrade day for Stellar has come. On September 20 at 3:00 PM UTC (8:00 AM PST), the Stellar testnet will upgrade to Protocol 20.
The Protocol 20 update is still the largest and most difficult upgrade to date, as was revealed in a blog post.
As with Soroban, it is still planned that the upcoming protocol update would include adding the Stellar testnet’s smart contract architecture.
With the help of a $100 million investment, the native smart-contract platform Soroban was introduced on the Stellar network in October 2022 and has since experienced great growth.
The deployment of Soroban on the Stellar testnet, which is presently live on Futurenet, is a significant accomplishment. Soroban was built in Rust. The company claims that Soroban’s Futurenet would continue to operate normally following the update in an X post.
The update would also release candidate versions of Stellar Core and Horizon in addition to the Soroban smart contracts.
XLM price action
XLM was modestly down 0.43% in the previous day to $0.1177 at the time of writing. The announcement of the upgrade has undoubtedly had little impact on the price of XLM.
But the market never ceases to surprise, so if bulls start to appear, this pattern might suddenly change. Historically, rather than immediately, days pass before significant changes have an effect on the price of XLM.
XLM has been decreasing since September 11 and hit a low of $0.115 on September 17. After seven days of losses, XLM started to recover, but bulls had a hard time moving over the $0.12 level.
Given the past performance, XLM could choose to resist the current downturn and make a move a few days following the upgrade.
Given that the past can only be used as a reference, traders should keep an eye on the overall market trend to assess how the price of XLM will move in the days to come.
