DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Puntored, a Colombian fintech serving low- and middle-income populations across Latin America, raised $2M from the Stellar Development Foundation's Enterprise Fund to expand its technological capabilities and enable cross-border transactions via the Stellar blockchain network.
Soroswap.Finance, the first DEX on the Soroban Blockchain in the Stellar ecosystem, announces the listing of $NGNC, a Naira-pegged stablecoin natively supported on Stellar. This enhances liquidity, FX utility, and cross-border payments for Nigerian users. Users can trade, add liquidity, and swap NGNC with assets like XLM, BTC, ETH, and USDC.
BAF explains why Stellar's protocol-level design is safer for payments than smart contracts. Built-in multi-signature accounts, compliance features, and automatic payment logic reduce complexity and attack surface. Particularly suited for CBDCs and cross-border transfers where security is paramount.
This article explains smart contract wallets (smart wallets) and their advantages over traditional crypto wallets, including enhanced functionality, security features, and passkey support. It highlights how Stellar's Protocol 20 and 21 enable passkey-powered smart wallets to improve user onboarding and accessibility.
The Stellar Development Foundation released a documentary called 'The Onchain Effect' showcasing how blockchain technology is solving real-world financial problems. The film tells the story of an Australian entrepreneur in Colombia who uses Stellar and the Decaf wallet to safely pay his employees in USDC, eliminating the need to carry dangerous amounts of cash.
This article explains token vesting and streaming protocols, highlighting their importance for crypto projects to align incentives and prevent dumps. It details closed-ended and open-ended streaming models, with examples like Sablier, Superfluid, Hedgey, and LlamaPay. TokenOps is presented as a platform integrating these for efficient vesting management.
Stellar has released an interactive Anchor Network Map that visualizes the global reach of Stellar anchors across 180 countries. The map enables developers and financial institutions to discover on/off-ramp services and understand payment rail coverage by region.
OwlTing Group integrated its OwlPay Wallet Pro with Stellar to support USDC stablecoin, expanding access to 8+ million Stellar accounts. The integration enables compliant cross-border payments and allows users to pay transaction fees in fiat currency.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q2 2024 quarterly report, highlighting network growth to 8.4 million addresses, real-world asset supply exceeding $598 million, and significant progress in tokenization and Soroban adoption. The report showcases achievements including WisdomTree's expanded retail access, $7.8 million in enterprise investments, and $5 million in Stellar Community Fund awards to 107 projects.
This article explains the role and importance of Lumens, Stellar's native currency, detailing how they function as transaction fees, maintain network security through minimum balance requirements, and serve as a bridge currency for cross-border payments. It also highlights Stellar's unique consensus protocol (SCP) and its advantages over traditional blockchain networks.
Rob Durst announces Digicus, a visual block-based IDE for Soroban smart contract development that aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers. The tool allows developers to visualize, understand, and edit Soroban contracts without requiring deep Rust expertise.
Huma Finance publishes a comprehensive overview of PayFi (Payment Finance), a new frontier in real-world assets that combines stablecoins with financing mechanisms to enable scalable, compliant payment solutions. The article introduces the PayFi Stack—a framework with six layers (Transaction, Currency, Custody, Financing, Compliance, Application)—and highlights Stellar's role alongside Solana in providing high-throughput, low-cost transaction infrastructure for payments.
This guide explains how Ugandan users can withdraw cryptocurrency from Binance to Ugandan Shillings (UGX) via Mobile Money or bank accounts using Bingtellar, a web3 payments platform. It provides a detailed step-by-step process, highlighting Bingtellar's advantages over P2P methods. The article mentions Stellar as one of the affordable blockchain networks for low-cost transfers.
Glo Dollar, backed by a $250,000 SDF donation, launches on Stellar to enable embedded philanthropy. Users can send Glo Dollars for remittances and social payouts while automatically supporting charities through reserve earnings, with potential to generate $3 million yearly for causes.
Stellar introduces State Archival, a protocol solution to blockchain state bloat that archives unused ledger entries while maintaining security through Merkle proofs stored in History Archives. This approach enables Stellar to maintain low validator costs, high throughput, and scalability without requiring expensive hardware.
An educational article introducing Stellar's blockchain network, explaining its Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), and demonstrating real-world applications through IBM World Wire and ClickPesa for cross-border payments and financial inclusion.
This guide explores zero-knowledge proofs (ZK Proofs) on the Stellar network, explaining how they enable privacy, scalability, and interoperability for financial applications. It covers ZK Proof fundamentals, implementations like zk-SNARKs and zk-STARKs, and their applications in DeFi, financial inclusion, and privacy-preserving systems.
Pendulum's Q2 2024 roundup highlights the launch of their Forex AMM on Testnet powered by Nabla and progress on the Spacewalk bridge uniting Stellar and Polkadot ecosystems. Key developments include vDOT collateral from a successful Polkadot treasury proposal, stablecoin offramping to bank accounts, Soroswap integration, Subscan listing, and new liquidity pools on Zenlink for Stellar holders. Governance referendums advanced asset registrations and network upgrades.
MYKOBO is transitioning its EURC stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain to Circle's EURC, affecting over 25K asset holders. This move supports MiCAR compliance and expands services to Ethereum, Avalanche, and Solana. Current services will continue uninterrupted during the transition.
Reflector hosted an AMA with Tomer Weller from the Stellar Development Foundation covering Stellar's scalability, latency optimization, DeFi composability on Soroban, and oracle use cases like prediction markets. The discussion highlighted upcoming performance improvements including parallel contract execution and networking optimizations planned for 2025.
Coinbase submitted CFTC filings to list futures products for five tokens—Polkadot, Shiba Inu, Stellar Lumens, Avalanche, and Chainlink—with trading slated to begin on or after July 15. The expansion aims to give traders more access points for risk management and price speculation.