Stellar Ecosystem
News

The Stellar Newsletter highlights key developments including the launch of the open-source Stellar Disbursement Platform, Allbridge's cross-chain bridge connecting Stellar to Ethereum, Solana, Celo, and Polygon, and SDF's investment in MoneyGram International. It also promotes Meridian 2023 conference, developer tools for Soroban, and various ecosystem updates like Airtm's USDC integration and Q2 review. The content emphasizes Stellar's growth in interoperability, financial inclusion, and smart contract scalability.

Soroban has achieved feature completeness after a year of public development through 10 preview releases, with over 70 ecosystem projects now building in parallel. The platform is closing in on a stable release candidate with a renewed focus on developer experience, tooling, and documentation.

The Stellar Development Foundation joined the Bytecode Alliance as only the second blockchain member, positioning itself to influence WebAssembly standards and advocate for blockchain developers' needs in the Wasm ecosystem.

Soroban's fee structure uses granular resource metering to price compute, memory, and storage independently, enabling more efficient block utilization and lower validator costs than traditional gas-based systems like Ethereum's.

This educational article explains blockchain oracles as bridges between smart contracts and real-world data, covering their types, decentralization levels, and the oracle problem. It highlights oracle use cases in DeFi and mentions Soroban as Stellar's native smart contracts platform.

The Stellar Community Fund supports 70+ Soroban projects with educational tools and developer resources. Featured tools include Soroban-React, useSoroban.app, Soroban Learn, Sorobix, SoroSorcerer, and AnChain.AI's smart contract catalog, all designed to lower barriers to entry for Rust and smart contract development.

An educational guide explaining how stablecoins work, their benefits on the Stellar network, and use cases. The article highlights Stellar's advantages for stablecoin issuance including speed, low costs, compliance features, and lists major stablecoins like USDC, EURC, GYEN, ZUSD, and AUDD available on the network.

This article outlines the essential building blocks required for a thriving smart contract ecosystem on Soroban, including financial protocols (AMMs, lending markets), data access tools (oracles, indexers), user interfaces (wallets, block explorers), and security mechanisms. It demonstrates how these interconnected components enable real-world DeFi use cases like decentralized lending.

Scalps leverages Soroban smart contracts on Stellar to power a loyalty management system for merchants worldwide, using the POINTS token for discounts and minting branded Loyalty NFTs. These NFTs include Discount, VIP Membership, Event Access, and Collectible types, each with specific smart contract features for minting, validation, and benefit application. The system optimizes storage with IPFS and Soroban storage types to manage fees effectively.

An educational overview of blockchain fundamentals, explaining how distributed ledgers work, their advantages over centralized databases, and comparisons of major blockchain platforms including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Stellar.

A comprehensive guide to Rust development for smart contracts on Soroban, covering setup, language advantages over Solidity, and resources from the Stellar Development Foundation for learning and building.

The Stellar Development Foundation shared progress on Soroban's Minimum Viable Ecosystem, outlining priority building blocks like financial primitives, data tools, and wallets needed before mainnet launch this fall. The foundation is actively funding projects through the Stellar Community Fund and inviting developers to help shape the platform.

RPCiege is a series of Soroban smart contract coding puzzles that teach Rust fundamentals through gamified challenges. Players complete skirmishes to earn digital collectible cards, with eight challenges released so far covering contract invocation, string types, testing, RPC queries, callbacks, RNG, and byte array operations.

Aquarius announces participation in Stellar Community Fund round 15 to develop Soroban-powered AMMs on the Stellar network. The project aims to create Uniswap v2-style smart contracts, advanced AMM types, and AQUA reward distribution on Soroban futurenet. This builds on Aquarius' established liquidity incentivization system, which has distributed over $2.25M in rewards.

Soroban implements state expiration to address blockchain state bloat, becoming the first blockchain to deploy this solution at mainnet launch. The design includes an Expired State Store, two storage types (Temporary and Persistent), and a rent model to prioritize important data and improve network scalability.

The Stellar Newsletter highlights upcoming events like Meridian 2023 in Madrid with Idris Elba, MoneyGram's USDC case study on Stellar, and Coinbase's integration with USDC on the network. It covers improvements to the Anchor Directory, wallet on/off-ramp integrations, Soroban infrastructure projects, and a new Soroban security bug bounty. Developer updates include proposed transaction changes and SCF submission best practices.

Soroban Preview 10 introduces new State Expiration logic to address blockchain bloat issues, along with Rust SDK changes and clearer smart contract limits. July focused on refactors rather than new features, including rethinking governance token distribution. A new Stable Liquidity Pools contract for stablecoins is in development for future deployment.

The Stellar Community Fund spotlights four SCF-awarded projects enhancing Soroban: Reflector (price feed oracle), Chainlink Oracles Relayer (VRF proxy), Elio DAO (decentralized governance), and Anchain.ai's Smart Contract Catalog (developer templates).

Tech Talks with Tomer Episode 3 Season 2 features Chad Ostrowski from Aha Labs discussing smart contract development across NEAR, Soroban, and CosmWasm. The video series hosted by Tomer Weller, VP of Product at @StellarOrg, explores innovations in blockchain engineering.

Soroban is Stellar's smart contract platform launching on mainnet, combining Rust and WebAssembly to enable DeFi applications while leveraging Stellar's 8-year track record in payments and anchor network for global financial access.

EU regulators finalized MiCA crypto regulation and are working on a Data Act that could impose problematic requirements on smart contracts built on public blockchains, potentially hindering DeFi development across Europe.

Soroban, Stellar's native smart contract platform, learns from Ethereum's design mistakes to offer better developer experience. Key improvements include native XLM token integration without wrapping, built-in event emissions, re-entrancy attack prevention, checksummed addresses, and single-transaction token transfers.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched a new bug bounty program on HackerOne focused on Soroban, the network's smart contract platform. The program offers rewards up to $50k for critical vulnerabilities, with higher bounties as Soroban matures toward Mainnet launch.

FXDAO announces it is the first legally incorporated DAO on the Soroban network, providing legal recognition to the project. They are developing a governance contract to manage all other protocol contracts, ensuring community approval for changes. The protocol is nearing completion and ready for deployment on Soroban once the network launches.

Soroban offers developers a compelling alternative to Ethereum and Solana through inclusive technology choices like WebAssembly and Rust, a greenfield ecosystem, global financial reach with diverse stablecoins, superior network reliability, and a streamlined developer experience.

A DAO is nearing legal incorporation and aims to be the first fully operating on the Soroban network. They've completed the Safety Pool contract, which liquidates undercollateralized vaults to maintain protocol health, but face integration issues due to Soroban preview limitations. Next steps include refactoring contracts and developing the Staking Pool.