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A diverse panel discusses blockchain's role in addressing global social challenges including poverty, healthcare, and environmental issues. Speakers from Partizia, Positive Blockchain, Algorand, MASPERS, and Stellar Development Foundation share real-world use cases ranging from humanitarian aid distribution to rural women's financial inclusion and climate finance.

Stellar Development Foundation held Q4 2024 review webinar covering 18 billion total transactions, 9 million network addresses, $52 million smart contract TVL, and announced 2025 strategy focused on top-10 DeFi ranking, 5 million monthly active addresses, and $3 billion in real-world assets.

Danelle Dixon, CEO of Stellar Development Foundation, discusses how Stellar's asset issuance and payment infrastructure is driving real-world adoption in aid distribution, cross-border payments, and tokenized real-world assets, with major partners like Franklin Templeton lowering barriers to entry.

Stellar protocol 23 introduces partial state archival (CAP 62) and in-memory Soroban state (CAP 66), separating live and archived contract data into distinct databases. Live Soroban state will be cached in memory with optimized fee structures, while automatic restore functionality eliminates the need for separate restore operations in most cases.

Stellar Development Foundation and Global Citizen launched the Acuna Wallet, a blockchain-powered digital wallet enabling African creators to receive payments from global platforms like YouTube and Spotify directly into U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins, with pilot launch in Ghana.

Stellar DevRel team discusses 2025 priorities at their San Francisco offsite, highlighting focus on monthly active developers and daily smart contract invocations on Soroban. Key initiatives include passkeys, LaunchTube, and fun on-chain experiences to drive ecosystem growth.

Etherfuse CEO Dave Taylor discusses launching tokenized sovereign debt on Stellar, starting with US and Mexican treasuries and expanding to Brazilian and European bonds. The platform enables retail investors to earn yield on government bonds through blockchain, with plans to add African assets and integrate with DeFi protocols.

Stellar Development Foundation chief of staff discusses institutional adoption of blockchain at World Economic Forum, highlighting how Stellar enables institutions to process 50,000 transactions for $120 versus $50,000 traditionally, while emphasizing optimism around stablecoin legislation and regulatory clarity.

Hoops Finance presented major UI overhaul and new features at Stellar dev meeting, including risk analytics dashboard, API with AI endpoints, and smart savings account contracts using Soroban for automated liquidity management.

Herbal Karman from Huma and Tomer Weller from Stellar discuss PayFi, a new financial sector combining payment financing with blockchain. They cover the $2.8B in PayFi transactions, the six-layer OpenPayFi stack, and how Stellar's infrastructure powers real-world payment solutions globally.

Developer demonstrates how to write and deploy an NFT smart contract in Rust to Stellar's Soroban platform, covering contract structure, IPFS metadata storage, and deployment to testnet and mainnet with live minting examples.

Garand from Stellar protocol team presents State Archival, a novel solution to state bloat that assigns TTL values to ledger entries, archives expired data off-chain in Merkle tries, and defends against double restore, malicious archival, and double nonce attacks. Implementation launched on mainnet in February 2025.

Tutorial on deploying a fungible token to Stellar's Soroban network using Rust and WebAssembly, including smart contract initialization, minting, transfers, and integration with Freighter wallet and a React dApp frontend.

Danelle Dixon, CEO of Stellar Development Foundation, discusses SDF's mission to create equitable access to the global financial system through blockchain technology, emphasizing foundational infrastructure, strategic partnerships like MoneyGram and UNHCR, and the importance of regulatory engagement for sustainable growth.

Developer walkthrough of Reflector, a price oracle for Stellar DeFi, covering a dev contest with XRF token rewards, boilerplate code for cross-contract calls, testing with ledger snapshots, and a predictive market example built on oracle data.

Lisa Nestor, Research Director at Stanford's Future of Digital Currency Initiative, discusses digital assets' role in financial inclusion, stable coin adoption in emerging markets like Argentina, CBDC development, and emerging opportunities in real-world asset tokenization and the digital dollar economy.

Nicola Dare from SDF explains oracles and the oracle problem in smart contracts. She covers oracle types (software, hardware, cross-chain, compute-enabled), decentralization levels, and how leading oracles solve the challenge of maintaining blockchain security and trustlessness when accessing off-chain data.

Phoenix DeFi Hub completes Phase 1 on Soroban with live swap and LP functionality. The team is now applying for Phase 2 funding to add routing APIs, fiat onramps via Kato, SubQuery integration, and a public data API for the Stellar ecosystem.

A Stellar developer discusses Mercury, a data indexing service for Soroban contracts, covering how to use indexers to convert blockchain data into queryable formats, the Zephyr VM for parallel processing, and design decisions around contract storage, events, and data architecture.

Julian from the Stellar Development Foundation compares Solidity and Soroban Rust SDK for smart contract development, building identical hello world contracts in both languages and highlighting Rust's advantages for blockchain including concurrency safety and lower computational overhead.

Blue Orion presents a blockchain-based voting application built on Stellar that ensures transparent, immutable election results through election-specific tokens and channel accounts to prevent fraud.

Developer tutorial on Soroban state management covering persistent, temporary, and instance storage types, rental fees for data storage, and practical code examples for storing and extending contract data on the Stellar blockchain.

Tutorial on Soroban smart contract constructors, explaining how they work during contract deployment, with practical examples of declaring constructors, setting storage, and deploying to testnet.

Tomer, Stellar's CPO, discusses the launch of Soroban smart contracts, security-first development practices, and Stellar's focus on real-world utility and financial inclusion. He highlights the Audit Bank grant program and emphasizes prevention over mitigation in DeFi security.