DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Stellar Development Foundation shares how the ecosystem accelerated Automated Market Maker (AMM) development for Protocol 18 by involving developers early with API specs, mock environments, and Futurenet testing, enabling simultaneous product launches upon network upgrade in November.
Wilhelm Wanecek's research study estimates Stellar network electricity consumption at 0.222 Wh per transaction, with network traffic accounting for 94% of power use. The findings demonstrate Stellar's energy efficiency compared to proof-of-work blockchains and highlight the protocol's successful decoupling of decentralization from extreme power consumption.
Project Venus is a DeFi protocol on Stellar using Turing Signing Servers (TSS) to enable trustless smart contracts without an on-chain VM. It implements short-term FX forwards to improve capital efficiency for Stellar-based financial institutions like remittance companies. TSS leverages off-chain servers (turrets) combined with Stellar's multi-sig for efficient DeFi.
SDF released its Q2 2021 report highlighting network growth, two protocol upgrades, $18M in Enterprise Fund investments, and the approval of Automated Market Makers for Protocol 18. The network demonstrated resilience after a temporary validator outage in April.
The Stellar Development Foundation relaunched its demo wallet with a unified interface consolidating separate protocol testing tools. The redesigned wallet now supports multiple SEPs including deposits, withdrawals, cross-border payments, and regulated assets, serving both developers and non-technical users learning Stellar protocols.
Stellar Protocol 18 proposal to add automated market makers (AMMs) was approved for implementation on June 25, 2021. AMMs will provide an alternative liquidity source alongside the existing order book exchange, enabling easier participation in market making and improving cross-asset payment efficiency.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced changes to its Debian package distribution for Stellar Core and Horizon nodes. Support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has ended, and operators must upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 LTS, with SDF committing to support all future Ubuntu LTS releases.
The Stellar public network successfully upgraded to Protocol 17 on June 1, 2021, introducing Asset Clawback—a feature enabling businesses to issue regulated financial instruments like bonds and equities while maintaining compliance capabilities.
Stellar Protocol 17 introduces asset clawback, enabling regulated financial instruments like bonds and equities to comply with securities regulations requiring issuer revocation abilities. Validators will vote on the upgrade June 1, 2021.
The Stellar Development Foundation announces Protocol 17 upgrade with a new Asset Clawback feature. Developers and node operators must update Stellar Core, Horizon, and SDKs before the June 1, 2021 network upgrade vote.
The Stellar Development Foundation executed a Protocol 16 upgrade on April 10 after an outage on April 6 caused validator and Horizon nodes to go offline. The upgrade fixed the issue affecting multiple nodes without impacting network stability.
Stellar public network validators voted to upgrade to Protocol 16 on April 10, 2024, to resolve an issue that caused nodes to go offline. The upgrade took effect immediately, and node operators need to install compatible software to avoid disruptions.
Stellar network upgraded to Protocol 16 on April 10, 2021 following a network incident. Node operators must update to Stellar Core v16.0.0 and Horizon v2.1.0 to restore service and rejoin the network.
SDF's validator nodes went offline for 10 hours on April 10, 2021, but the Stellar network continued operating normally with other validators. The issue was traced to a single operation in one ledger, fixed via Protocol 16 upgrade, demonstrating the network's decentralized resilience.
The Stellar Development Foundation spotlights eight female technical leaders on their teams, sharing career advice, paths into blockchain, and perspectives on representation in tech and the blockchain industry.
Horizon 2.0 introduces a modular architecture that decouples Horizon from Stellar Core, enabling developers to run infrastructure with significantly fewer resources, faster ingestion times, and greater flexibility. The new Captive Core approach reduces disk requirements by hundreds of gigabytes and cuts ingestion time from weeks to about a day.
A comprehensive FAQ addressing common transaction submission errors on Stellar, particularly 504 timeout errors. The article explains how dynamic fees work, surge pricing mechanics, ledger limits, and provides practical guidance for developers to optimize transaction submission and avoid timeouts.
This article explains the Stellar DEX pricing limitation for indivisible NFT tokens due to INT32 constraints and presents Litemint's solution using synthetic assets and path payments. It details how small stroop amounts cause offer price overflows and demonstrates a workaround for high-value NFT trades. The post includes JavaScript code examples for implementing bids and offers that automatically handle the limitation.
Stellar Development Foundation released an updated analytics dataset with 5-minute refresh intervals and open-sourced its data pipeline tooling, including stellar-etl and Apache Airflow orchestration, enabling developers to build real-time Stellar data pipelines.
Stellar public network upgraded to Protocol 15 at 1600 UTC, introducing Claimable Balances and Sponsored Reserves features to enable more user-friendly app development on the network.
Protocol 15 introduces claimable balances, enabling payments to accounts without requiring pre-existing trust lines. This two-part payment mechanism solves a major friction point in asset transfers while enabling new payment primitives like recoverable and multi-recipient payments.
Stellar is skipping Protocol 14 and upgrading the public network to Protocol 15 on November 23, 2020. The change addresses a rare bug discovered during testnet testing that could have caused validator crashes. Developers running Stellar Core or Horizon must install updated versions before the upgrade.
Stellar validators will vote on Protocol 15 upgrade on November 23, 2020, introducing Claimable Balances and Sponsored Reserves to simplify user onboarding and reduce friction for anchors and app developers building on the network.
Stellar Development Foundation announced that Protocol 14 will be skipped in favor of Protocol 15 due to a critical bug discovered during testnet testing. The public network upgrade vote has been rescheduled to November 23, 2020, with detailed upgrade instructions provided for validators, Horizon operators, and SDK users.
The Stellar Community Fund manager shares six strategies for winning SCF grants: serve your audience, pick the right fund tier, exceed guidelines, engage the community, emphasize marketing, and keep iterating. Success requires balancing technical quality with presentation and community involvement.
The Stellar Development Foundation launched Stellar Community Fund 2.0, splitting the grant program into two funds (Seed and Lab) and introducing a nomination panel plus quadratic voting to address voter fatigue and improve project selection fairness.
SEP-30 enables user-friendly non-custodial wallets by eliminating recovery phrases and passwords. Users log in with just a phone number while maintaining full account control through device keys and distributed recovery servers. Vesseo, a USD savings app on Stellar, demonstrates this approach in production.
Part two of a key management series explains how Stellar accounts work, covering public/secret keys, master keys, multi-signature capabilities, and common wallet strategies. The post introduces SEP-30 as a better approach to user-friendly key management and account recovery.
Stellar Development Foundation introduces SEP-30, an ecosystem standard for non-custodial wallets that simplifies key management and recovery using multi-signature technology. Users can recover accounts through identity verification rather than managing backup keys, making blockchain more accessible to mainstream users.