DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
AMA recap with MYKOBO CEO Seyi Akin-Olugbemi, issuer of the EURC Euro stablecoin on Stellar. He discusses his background in fintech, the motivation behind MYKOBO for financial inclusion in Africa, and why Stellar is ideal for value transfer. MYKOBO app supports EURC, USDC, XLM, and AQUA, all on Stellar, with upcoming liquidity pools.
Blend is a new liquidity protocol primitive for Stellar, enabling anyone to create insured lending pools with Soroban smart contracts. It provides lending and borrowing capabilities, adapting to market conditions while protecting suppliers via a backstop module. The protocol enhances Stellar's ecosystem for fintech, trading, DAOs, and DeFi applications.
Arf launched a USDC-backed working capital solution in partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation, providing unsecured short-term loans for cross-border payment institutions. Within four months, the platform deployed $80M across 800+ locations globally, generating $150M in cumulative on-chain USDC volume.
Soroban smart contracts on Stellar enable a unique cash-to-DeFi pathway through the network's anchor infrastructure and MoneyGram Ramps, allowing underserved populations to access financial services directly from cash deposits to income-generating protocols.
EURC is a Euro-pegged stablecoin launched on the Stellar blockchain by UAB MYKOBO, offering secure, fast, and sustainable transactions. It has seen significant adoption with over 150k in circulating supply and substantial trading volume on Stellar's DEX. To celebrate its launch and MYKOBO's anniversary, zero transaction fees are offered throughout March 2023.
Soroban needs essential developer tools, financial primitives, and educational resources before Mainnet launch to attract developers and ensure ecosystem success. The article outlines key fundamentals including block explorers, security tools, oracles, and collateral-backed tokens.
Tommaso De Ponti, a Stellar developer since mid-2020, shares his journey from learning programming at age 11 to building Soroban smart contracts. His work includes DeFi projects and a zero-knowledge proof coin mixer built with his brother.
MYKOBO recaps its 2022 journey, from inception inspired by remittance challenges to launching Version 2 on the Stellar blockchain with EURC stablecoin. Key achievements include over 400 users, 155K EUR traded volume, and integration with Stellar protocols like SEP-6, SEP-24, and SEP-31. The company anticipates 2023 expansions like EURC swaps, new payment corridors, IBAN services, and debit cards.
The Stellar Newsletter highlights recent ecosystem developments including Soroban smart contracts live on Futurenet with a $100M developer fund and Sorobanathon. It covers Meridian 2022 on-demand sessions, Stellar Quest Live Series 5, bridge bounty grants, and the new Anchor Platform. Additional updates include stablecoin launches, SDF investments in NetXD and Wave, and community fund discussions.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced five winners of its $5 million Bridge Bounty Program, awarding up to $1 million in XLM each to teams building cross-chain interoperability solutions connecting Stellar with other DeFi ecosystems. Winners include Allbridge, Axelar, Cubist, Kaladin, and Multichain.
Litemint has launched decentralized NFT auctions on the Stellar blockchain, utilizing time-bound transactions, pre-authorized transactions, and path payments for secure, trustless execution. The system ensures no third-party custody, bid protection until auction end, reserve price enforcement, and participant withdrawal rights. Full settlement occurs on the Stellar DEX via a pre-authorized contract transaction.
BP Ventures won a $125,000 grant from the Stellar Community Fund for its solution enabling FinTechs to leverage USDC on the Stellar blockchain for payments. The platform integrates with MoneyGram's USDC services for seamless cross-border remittances. This highlights growing adoption of Stellar and USDC in the remittance industry.
Aquarius announces ICE tokens, a new mechanism for AQUA holders on Stellar to freeze their tokens and receive boosted liquidity rewards and enhanced voting power. By locking AQUA via the locker tool, users gain four non-transferable ICE tokens (ICE, upvoteICE, downvoteICE, governICE) that increase yields on SDEX/AMM and enable simultaneous use in liquidity and governance voting. ICE tokens melt linearly over the lock period, up to three years, with voting power scaling up to 10x.
Aquarius Governance v2.0 launches with major upgrades including a mandatory discussion phase, editable proposals, redesigned fees, vote lock periods, and improved UI. These changes address low participation and other issues from v1.0, built on the Stellar blockchain via SDEX and AMM integrations. The system now encourages better proposals and early voting.
Stellar Development Foundation announces Starbridge, a trust-minimized bridge enabling bidirectional asset transfers between Stellar and Ethereum. The project uses decentralized m-of-n signer architecture to lock assets and facilitate wrapped asset transfers across blockchains.
A comprehensive overview of Africa's rapidly growing Web3 economy, highlighting major blockchain protocols (including Stellar), venture capital investments, NGO partnerships, and government initiatives shaping the continent's crypto and blockchain landscape.
Stellar Development Foundation is sponsoring SXSW's Finance 3.0 summit from March 11-13, hosting a 48-hour NFT hackathon, workshops, and panels on DAOs, DeFi, NFTs, and digital assets with industry leaders.
The Script3 team announces that YieldBlox Protocol will delay its mainnet launch on Stellar Turrets and instead wait for Stellar's on-chain smart contracts due to superior security, community focus, and feasibility concerns. They detail the decision process following SDF's roadmap announcement and unsuccessful grant proposal. The project remains committed to launching securely with the YBX token once smart contracts are ready.
Aquarius is upgrading its SDEX rewards engine from v1 to v2 following successful nine-day tests on seven Stellar markets. The v2 engine uses a more sophisticated formula considering offer size, duration, spread proximity, and fulfillment to better reward genuine liquidity providers. Testing showed reduced rewards for wash traders, more users receiving rewards, and significantly increased market liquidity.
Aquarius introduces native 'Bribes' feature on the Stellar blockchain, enabling projects to reward AQUA holders for voting on liquidity markets without custom development. Bribes are set up via a simple interface at vote.aqua.network/bribes, using any Stellar asset with a minimum value equivalent to 100,000 AQUA. Distribution begins February 28th, with a 10M AQUA launch bonus for new markets.
Aquarius Governance is a decentralized system launched in November 2021 for AQUA token holders within the Stellar ecosystem to propose and vote on protocol changes. It features a 7-day discussion phase, fees for creation and publication that are burned for deflation, and a 10% quorum requirement. Successful proposals are executed by the Aquarius Signers Guild.
BravePay introduces liquidity rewards for the BRAVE-XLM pool on Stellar's AMM to boost adoption and returns beyond the standard 0.3% fee. The program adds 10% of the pool size in BRAVE rewards, distributed daily based on individual shares. It emphasizes fraud prevention, long-term commitments, and ecosystem growth.
Brave, a top-performing Stellar token, announces a redesigned staking rewards system to eliminate fraud from previous universal and trading rewards. The new Brave Staking offers tiered APYs up to 26% for 12-month periods, with flexible withdrawals and no minimums. Monthly burns of 24 million Braves and discontinuation of old rewards aim to stabilize price and foster long-term growth.
Stellar processed 2 billion operations in 2021, with relevant assets up 11.39% and transaction volume up 2.3x. The SDF invested $75.25M through its Enterprise Fund, launched educational programs reaching 10,000 students, and passed three protocol upgrades including AMM functionality and asset clawback features.
Stellar Core v18.2.0 introduces a traffic-shaping feature to mitigate failed arbitrage bot transactions that have been bloating the ledger and increasing network fees. The feature allows validators to filter circular path payment transactions destined to fail while preserving healthy arbitrage activity.
YieldBlox introduces Protocol Owned Debt to eliminate liquidation cascade risks by having lending pools borrow from themselves and settle via fees, enhancing stability and capital efficiency on Stellar. It also upgrades to Growing Liability Tokens for better interest tracking and ~30% performance gains. Launch delayed by a month, with community calls planned for December.
Meridian 2021 tech talks are now available on demand, featuring SDF Engineering team presentations on Starlight payment channels, SPEEDEX decentralized exchange, Horizon 2.0, KYC processes, SDKs, Stellar Turrets for DeFi, Stellar Core, and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals.
This article details the main wallets of the Aquarius project on the Stellar blockchain, including their purposes, original AQUA token holdings, and Stellar Expert explorer links. It covers wallets for liquidity rewards, airdrops, community DAO, voting/staking rewards, emergency fund, investors, advisors/partners, and founders/team. The transparency leverages blockchain's verifiable data for AQUA holders to monitor easily.
This technical blog post details the implementation requirements and mathematical foundations for integrating SPEEDEX, a novel scalable decentralized exchange design, into Stellar-core. It covers the three main protocol changes needed, the Arrow-Debreu economic model underlying SPEEDEX, and the Tâtonnement algorithm used for efficient price computation.