• Soroban’s unique fee model and scalability features optimize smart contract efficiency and network participation costs, fostering sustainable growth.
• Its comprehensive metering system and resource constraints contribute to efficient contract design, ensuring optimal utilization of resources and fair pricing.

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has been working out ways to improve the scalability of the Stellar (XLM) blockchain. One major breakthrough has been introducing the Soroban fee structure aimed at improving the network’s scalability by manifold times.

Soroban is a user-friendly smart contracts platform built using the Rust programming language, focusing on scalability and practicality. It is currently operational on the test network named Futurenet and smoothly integrates with the established Stellar blockchain.

Soroban has emerged as a scalable smart contract platform having a novel fee structure. Soroban’s design has incorporated scalability as a core aspect from its inception. For instance, in the recent Preview 10 release, the network introduced the initial phase of a unique state expiration model. This model manages ledger growth by enabling unused ledger entries to expire, ensuring the value and utility of smart contract data on the network, while also maintaining low network participation costs.

Soroban’s Novel Fee Structure

Soroban has strategically designed its fee model to ensure scalability. Unlike other networks, developers pay a resource fee that is assessed for each resource type, enabling precise pricing for individual resource consumption. This approach allows setting a block’s budget per metered resource, enhancing resource efficiency as contracts can be optimized to use all available metered resources intentionally.

Soroban employs a comprehensive metering system that accurately measures transaction resource usage, further optimizing contract efficiency. Additionally, it implements per-transaction resource limitations. With these mechanisms in place, Soroban’s smart contracts are engineered to be efficient and effective, bolstering the scalability, sustainability, and long-term viability of the Stellar network.

Soroban provides visibility into the resource capacity of each block, encompassing ledger entry actions, CPU instructions, and RAM. This empowers developers to build contracts aligned with these distinct metered resources, ensuring optimal utilization of all available resources within each block. This approach further enhances the capacity for processing more transactions per block while maintaining resource equilibrium.

Soroban’s network efficiency simplifies block processing and validation for validators, contributing to manageable validator expenses. This, in turn, sustains accessible network participation, a vital component of decentralization. Also, this structure also encourages developers to build their contracts efficiently and at low transaction fees.

Soroban Metering and Resource Limitations

Soroban’s fee mechanism is based on resource usage, requiring an accurate resource measurement system. Soroban utilizes a meticulous counting and metering model to track the costs of resources used during the execution of a smart contract, forming the basis for fee calculations.

Before a contract runs, the developer specifies the resource limits in the transaction. Throughout the transaction’s lifecycle, the metering system gauges resource consumption and increments the meter accordingly. If the resource limits are surpassed, the transaction halts to prevent excessive charges. When execution remains within the set limits, metered data is logged and utilized for calculating fees.

This comprehensive metering system facilitates Soroban’s nuanced resource-based fees and encourages efficient resource utilization.

While the fee structure promotes optimized contract design, resource restrictions genuinely enforce it. Soroban establishes a global network-wide transaction resource limit. These limits, like other network parameters, are determined through a validator vote as part of the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), showcasing the decentralized governance of the Stellar network. These limitations aren’t fixed and can be adjusted through validator voting in response to network demand and ecosystem requirements.

The Soroban developers are effectively crafting strategies to foster scalability. Elements like state expiration, resource fees, a precise metering system, and resource constraints work in harmony to create smart contracts that are both effective and valuable, ensuring reasonable and foreseeable costs. This collective effort culminates in a blockchain network that is not only sustainable but also poised for substantial scalability.