Stellar Ecosystem
News

The Stellar Development Foundation announced it will limit historical data access on its free Horizon service to one year of rolling data, effective August 1st, 2024. This change aims to reduce operational overhead and eliminate a centralized point of failure in the network, while directing users with longer historical data needs to alternative solutions like Hubble, third-party Horizon providers, or self-hosted infrastructure.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched the Soroban Security Audit Bank, distributing up to $1M in audit credits from six top-tier firms to 20-30 high-priority projects building on Soroban to strengthen smart contract security across the ecosystem.

The Stellar Development Foundation ran a dogfooding experiment called the Okashi Cakewalk, a web-based smart contract game built on Soroban that enabled all SDF employees—regardless of technical background—to write, deploy, and invoke smart contracts. Over 170 NFTs were minted on Futurenet, demonstrating successful onboarding to Soroban development and providing valuable UX feedback to the Okashi team.

A comprehensive guide explaining authentication and authorization mechanisms in blockchain, with specific focus on how Stellar and Soroban implement these security features through digital signatures, multisig, thresholds, and smart contract-based account abstraction.

A technical guide comparing data types between Solidity (EVM) and Rust (Soroban), part 2 of a migration series. The article covers primitive and composite types, key differences like String vs. Symbol, and provides code examples for both languages.

This article explores yield-bearing assets on Stellar using Soroban smart contracts, featuring the Stellar Asset Sandbox by Cheesecake Labs. It provides detailed guides for creating and managing certificates of deposit and bonds on Stellar's testnet.

Stellar Anchors serve as bridges between traditional finance and the Stellar blockchain, enabling fiat-to-digital asset exchanges, but face trust issues due to centralization. The new Anchor Transparency Node, powered by Log Store Network, provides verifiable transparency for off-chain transactions. This enhances trust, supports real-world assets, and fosters inter-business confidence in the Stellar ecosystem.

Protocol 20 is now live on Stellar Mainnet, enabling smart contracts through Soroban. Validators are coordinating a phased rollout with a Phase 1 vote scheduled for February 27, 2024, to gradually increase Soroban resource limits.

Stellar Mainnet upgraded to Protocol 20 on February 20, enabling smart contract functionality through Soroban. This guide provides developers and businesses with upgrade instructions for SDKs, infrastructure, and related software to ensure compatibility.

BiGGER, an Australian software development company, deployed the Stellar Disbursement Platform to streamline payroll for its 100+ contractors across South America, reducing monthly processing time from 8 hours to minutes. The company now hosts SDP instances for humanitarian organizations like Casa Tochan, enabling efficient digital aid distribution.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and its implementation on the Stellar blockchain. It explains DeFi's core components—including blockchain, smart contracts, DEXs, and liquidity pools—and highlights how Soroban, Stellar's native smart contracts platform, enables developers to build DeFi applications with access to real-world financial rails.

A comprehensive tutorial on migrating smart contracts from Ethereum's Solidity to Soroban's Rust SDK, comparing the two languages and providing step-by-step examples of building a 'Hello World' contract in both environments.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q4 2023 quarterly report highlighting major ecosystem achievements including Protocol 20 support, Soroban mainnet rollout, $4M in SCF funding to 88 projects, and over $2M in humanitarian aid disbursed via the Stellar Disbursement Platform.

This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to deploying a Soroban RPC server on DigitalOcean Kubernetes using Stellar Development Foundation Helm charts. It covers cluster creation, Helm repository setup, configuration for testnet, Nginx Ingress installation, DNS setup, and verification. Benefits include improved reliability, control, and performance for Stellar smart contract interactions.

Eiger, a Rust-focused web3 engineering firm, published its first newsletter showcasing two years of growth to 40 people, recent blog posts on Soroban tooling (Nebula), privacy protocols, and partnerships with Fireblocks, plus updates on partner projects like Elusiv's private swaps on Solana.

Aquarius announces updates and 2024 plans for building AMMs on Stellar using Soroban smart contracts. They've developed CPMM and StableSwap models inspired by Uniswap and Curve, with AQUA rewards for liquidity providers. A new UI and integrations are planned post-Soroban mainnet launch on January 30, 2024.

Stellar Aid Assist, launched one year ago in Ukraine with UNHCR, has successfully disbursed $1.1 million in aid to over 1,500 internally displaced people. The initiative's success led to the development and open-sourcing of the Stellar Disbursement Platform, enabling bulk payments across borders for governments, organizations, and companies.

This article explains asset tokenization on Stellar, covering what it is, who can tokenize assets, key benefits like operational efficiency and transparency, and the technical process for creating digital representations of real-world assets on the network.

Obsrvr provides blockchain infrastructure solutions tailored for the Stellar.org network and Soroban smart contracts platform. Their offerings include the Obsrvr Gateway, a managed service combining Horizon API and Soroban RPC servers, and Obsrvr Nodes for customizable, dedicated instances. These tools simplify blockchain adoption, enhance security, and enable businesses to integrate seamlessly with Stellar.

Range partners with Oak Security to deliver end-to-end security for Cosmos projects, extending audits into continuous monitoring. This addresses limitations like dynamic codebases and third-party risks. Range, trusted by Stellar among others, provides customized real-time security tools.

This article explains stablecoins, their types, growth, risks, and regulatory challenges in crypto markets. It highlights issues like centralization and past failures such as TerraUSD. Range is introduced as a leading platform for cross-chain stablecoin intelligence, trusted by Stellar and others.

Range CEO Andres Monteoliva discusses mitigative measures for blockchain bridge exploits at the DeFi Security Summit. The talk covers types of bridges and security mechanisms like rate limits and circuit breakers. Range, trusted by Stellar and others, provides cross-chain stablecoin infrastructure with compliance and risk tools.

Stellar's Protocol 20 upgrade, which enables Soroban smart contracts on Mainnet, is approaching a validator vote. The upgrade implements 12 Core Advancement Proposals and unlocks new possibilities for developers while maintaining Stellar's existing capabilities.

The Stellar Disbursement Platform (SDP), integrated with Beans, enables businesses and organizations to send thousands of cross-border payments instantly via the Stellar ledger. It supports payroll, micro-payments, and humanitarian aid with user-friendly features like dynamic links for recipients without blockchain experience. Beans offers versatile withdrawals in cash, bank transfers, or crypto across 180+ countries.

FxDAO announces a shift to quarterly updates and the deployment of its protocol on Soroban testnet. They've launched a new self-hosted website, a JavaScript SDK for integration, and an official Discord server. The team is preparing for Soroban mainnet launch.