Stellar Ecosystem
News

Drips is launching Stellar Wave 2 on February 19th with major improvements including application quotas, post-contribution surveys, language filtering, org profiles, Discord linking, and enhanced spam protection.

IRL, a cultural loyalty platform, successfully onboarded 73,000+ people into the Stellar ecosystem through real-world activations at Meridian 2025 in Rio de Janeiro and Art Basel's Stellar House in Miami, using Privy wallets and IRL Touchpoints to create seamless onchain experiences without requiring crypto knowledge.

COCA's 2025 review highlights its transformation from a crypto wallet to a stablecoin banking ecosystem with massive growth in users, card volume, and $COCA token value. Key achievements include Stellar integrations for USDC/EURC, a Series A with Stellar Development Foundation, and product launches like COCA 2.0 and rewards. The company outlines ambitious 2026 plans including Apple Pay, non-custodial accounts, and global expansion.

An essay arguing that blockchain protocols and traditional payment systems will coexist and complement each other rather than compete. The author, from the Stellar Development Foundation, advocates for building bridges between code-based coordination (open protocols) and committee-based coordination (legacy financial rails) to serve different use cases and global financial needs.

An analysis of why open blockchain networks offer superior legal and regulatory advantages for institutions managing critical financial operations, using the October 2025 AWS outage as a case study demonstrating the risks of centralized sequencers and single points of failure.

This article provides a comprehensive Spanish-language guide to Stellar Community Fund (SCF) 7.0, explaining its funding process, key changes, and application steps for builders in the Stellar ecosystem. It covers the Interest Form entry point, three Build tracks (Open, Integration, RFP), tranche-based funding up to $150K-$300K in XLM, and practical tips for maximizing success. SCF emphasizes real products, execution, and community governance over mere ideas.

The Stellar Development Foundation has launched SCF v7.0, a major upgrade to the Stellar Community Fund grant program featuring three new build award tracks (Integrate, Open, RFP), improved submission pathways with referral incentives, milestone-based funding tied to execution, ambassador-led Instawards for early-stage projects, and post-launch growth pathways for successful teams.

Token Terminal's weekly Snapshot covers emerging DeFi vault curators, Paxos' growth to $6.7B in issued assets including PYUSD and USDG, Solana's diversifying stablecoin landscape, and Ethereum L1's record transactions at low fees. It highlights new listings like Fathom on XDC and tokenized assets on Stellar such as sgBENJI and gBENJI. Platform updates include Studio improvements and a new Nansen integration.

Certora's 2025 report highlights their expansion as a leading DeFi security partner, securing 70% of top protocols by TVL including Stellar, Aave, and Compound. They reviewed hundreds of thousands of lines of code across chains like EVM, Solana, and Stellar, preventing 720+ vulnerabilities and protecting $196.5B in assets. Formal verification proved key invariants for protocols like Stellar, ensuring long-term solvency and security.

Stellar's financial ecosystem expanded significantly in 2025, with stablecoin market cap growing 53% to $243.6M driven by PayPal's PYUSD launch, while RWA market cap surged 196% to $890.2M. U.S. Bank is testing custom stablecoin issuance on Stellar, and the Marshall Islands completed the world's first onchain universal basic income disbursement by a national government.

Drips closed Q4 2025 strong with regional expansion across Asia, launched end-to-end RetroPGF with Filecoin, and introduced new protocol features including ORCID and website funding support. The team also announced Drips Wave, recurring bounty cycles launching with the Stellar Development Foundation in January 2026.

Trustless Work introduces an escrow-based capital allocation system for tokenized projects, where investor funds are held in smart contracts and released progressively based on verified milestones rather than upfront to issuers. The platform enables transparent, trustless fundraising for real-world assets, construction, and infrastructure projects by separating capital control from token issuance.

SCF #40 concluded 2025 with 24 awarded projects receiving $2.18M in XLM funding. The round received 85 submissions and introduced governance insights on voter participation, quorum adjustments, and upcoming SCF v7.0 improvements.

The article discusses expectations for a 2026 bear market in crypto following historical Bitcoin cycles, but argues this time might be different due to reduced selling pressure and positive developments like maturing web3 infrastructure. It highlights promising areas such as zero-knowledge tech and DeFi, alongside risks from macroeconomics and politics. An ad for Solang, enabling Solidity contracts on Stellar, appears at the end.

SorobanDomains is upgrading to NFDs (Non-Fungible Domains) using the SEP-0050 NFT standard on Stellar's Soroban. A new Registry v2 removes collateral requirements in favor of yearly fees and adds Soroban Events for better indexing. Existing domain owners get 90 days to migrate for free before new registrations open.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced an updated mandate framework for 2025 and beyond, reorganizing its XLM holdings into four strategic focus areas: SDF Development, Stellar Growth, Product and Innovation, and Assets and Liquidity. The update reflects the network's evolution toward production financial infrastructure and real-world asset adoption.

Drips launches Wave, a recurring monthly bounty cycle for open-source development. The first full program runs for Stellar starting January 2026, designed to attract developers, maintain projects, and grow communities.

This article explores how Franklin Templeton leveraged Stellar's open infrastructure to launch the first registered money market fund on a blockchain in 2021, demonstrating the "permissionless premium"—the ability to experiment, learn, and build without approval. The piece illustrates how open systems enable unexpected innovations, like Securrency's clawback feature that became critical for regulatory compliance, and create unpredictable adoption pathways that centralized platforms cannot.

The Stellar Development Foundation disclosed a bug in Soroban Live State Prioritization (introduced in Protocol 23) that corrupted 478 data entries starting September 4, 2025. The issue was in the eviction mechanism that moved outdated versions of persistent entries to hot-archive storage instead of the latest versions, affecting network data consistency.

The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #39 round awarded $1,115,655 in XLM to 12 innovative projects building on the Stellar network. Highlights include QuillTip for microtipping, Stallion for decentralized bounties, and RendBit for cross-border banking in Africa. The round featured record voter participation and governance updates to Neural Quorum Governance for fairer voting.

A Stellar ambassador recounts their experience at the Avalanche Build hackathon, emphasizing collaboration, community, and interoperability across blockchain ecosystems. They highlight learning from diverse participants, using tools like Vibecoding and AI, and their team's 3rd place finish. The event reinforced the value of open communities bridging networks like Stellar and Avalanche for real-world impact.

The Stellar i³ Awards 2025 recognized three standout projects at Stellar Meridian: Decaf won Impact for its non-custodial stablecoin app with 50k users, Etherfuse won Innovation for tokenized government treasuries and peso stablecoins, and DeFindex won Interoperability for its plug-and-play DeFi API for wallets.

Protocol 24 is a stability upgrade for Stellar that fixes a bug in the state archival feature. The upgrade was completed on mainnet on October 22, 2025, with infrastructure operators and validators required to update their software.

On October 9, SDF discovered a bug in Stellar's state archival feature (Protocol 23) that caused outdated entries to be archived and restored incorrectly. The network immediately paused archival eviction and deployed a patch to quarantine corrupted entries, affecting only 478 smart contract entries out of ~47 million ledger entries.

Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon warns that blockchain risks repeating history by becoming controlled by corporate monopolies rather than remaining open infrastructure. She argues for permissionless networks like Stellar over closed private blockchains that concentrate power and extract value.

Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon published an essay warning that the blockchain industry risks repeating historical monopolies if private companies continue building closed, vertically integrated networks. She argues for open, permissionless infrastructure like Stellar over proprietary blockchains controlled by financial institutions.