Stellar Ecosystem
News

Jay Malve has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer at Normal after just four months as a Full Stack Engineer. His contributions include architecting onchain index funds built on Stellar and enhancing the company's engineering culture. Jay outlines his vision for seamless crypto adoption across chains with intuitive products.

The Stellar Development Foundation is consolidating Go developer tools into a unified Go SDK, renaming the monorepo from stellar/go to stellar/go-stellar-sdk. This change aligns the Go ecosystem with other Stellar SDKs and improves discoverability by clearly separating reusable SDK components from service code.

A detailed comparison of COCA and KAST crypto cards highlights COCA's advantages in self-custody, real stablecoin cashback, zero fees, multichain support including Stellar, and additional perks like APY and travel benefits. KAST offers custodial convenience and broader availability but relies on speculative points rewards and higher fees. COCA is positioned as the superior choice for most users seeking real value.

U.S. Bank is testing stablecoin issuance on Stellar, choosing the network for its compliance features including asset-freeze controls, trust lines, and ability to handle 1,000+ transactions per second. The pilot signals banks are moving toward tokenized settlement infrastructure.

U.S. Bank is testing a stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain in collaboration with the Stellar Development Foundation and PwC. The project leverages Stellar's unique ability to freeze assets and unwind transactions at the blockchain layer, positioning the bank among traditional financial institutions exploring stablecoin infrastructure.

The Stellar network is introducing the X-Ray protocol upgrade, which adds native support for BN254 elliptic curve operations and Poseidon hash functions to enable developers to build zero-knowledge privacy applications. The upgrade, scheduled for testnet vote on January 7, 2026 and mainnet vote on January 22, 2026, establishes cryptographic foundations for privacy-preserving applications without compromising Stellar's transparency.

The article details the design philosophy behind Cyberbrawl, a blockchain game built on Stellar, emphasizing that fun and core game loops should not depend on blockchain finality. The author argues for prototyping simple loops first, targeting casual-midcore players, and using blockchain solely as a continuity layer for ownership and persistence. Stellar's speed and efficiency enable this seamless integration without disrupting gameplay.

Stellar Meridian 2025 in Rio showcased the evolution of Stellar's blockchain into production-grade infrastructure for payments, identity, RWAs, and stablecoins. Key sessions highlighted open systems, regulatory progress, privacy innovations, and real-world applications from partners like MoneyGram, Nubank, and Ondo Finance. LATAM and Africa emerged as blueprints for financial inclusion and efficient money movement.

Stablecoins like USDC, integrated with Stellar and MoneyGram via Hana, are revolutionizing remittances in emerging markets by enabling near-instant, low-cost transfers convertible to cash. This addresses high fees and delays in traditional systems, particularly in Southeast Asia where remittances are projected to exceed $100 billion in 2025. The partnership provides financial stability and inclusion for unbanked populations.

Raja Chakravorti, Chief Business Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation, describes Stellar as invisible blockchain infrastructure that seamlessly integrates with existing financial systems to drive real-world financial inclusion. He highlights key partnerships with MoneyGram and Franklin Templeton, enabling crypto-to-cash services across 430K locations in 175+ countries. Stellar's focus is on scalability, institutional adoption, and making money accessible without users noticing the blockchain.

Wirex has launched dual-stablecoin settlement using USDC and EURC on the Stellar blockchain, in partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation and Visa. This enables on-chain settlement of card payments, offering faster, cheaper, and more transparent alternatives to traditional banking. Users benefit from lower fees, 24/7 availability, and support for both USD and EUR settlements.

Stellar's Soroban runtime engineers have integrated Solidity support into Soroban via Hyperledger Solang, enabling developers to write smart contracts in Solidity and compile them to WebAssembly. The Solang Playground Web IDE is now available for developers to write, compile, and deploy Solidity contracts on Soroban Testnet.

Pavel Matveev of COCA, a non-custodial stablecoin-native wallet built on Stellar, is featured in the Stellar Community Fund Spotlight series. COCA received a $50K SCF grant and a $1M Series A investment from SDF to integrate USDC support and solve Web3 security and usability challenges for mass-market adoption.