DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Trustless Work is a Stellar-based escrow system where roles define permissions for managing funds in a trustless manner. Key roles include Issuer, Funder, Service Provider, Approver, Release Signer, Receiver, Platform Address, Dispute Resolver, and Observer. This design ensures transparency, security, and programmability without single-party control over funds.
MoneyGram leads the stablecoin on-ramp market via its Stellar partnership, processing USDC across 375,000 locations, while Western Union launches its own Solana-based USDPT stablecoin to capture economics. Ria trails with a Fireblocks partnership. This divergence highlights strategic splits in the remittance industry's blockchain adaptation.
Spiko details their custom blockchain infrastructure for handling indexing, real-time queries, and transaction relaying across multiple networks including Stellar. They moved away from off-the-shelf solutions like The Graph due to reliability issues, building a robust system using RPC servers. This architecture improves efficiency, reduces bugs, and speeds up expansion to new chains.
BPVentures and LightEcho announced a new Chainlink-compatible, SEP-40 compliant randomness feed for the Stellar Soroban ecosystem. Identified by the SEP-40 SYMBOL: RANDOM, it provides verifiable 32-byte random words for game developers via a standard oracle interface. This enables easy integration for games, mints, raffles, and procedural generation without custom code.
Stellar expanded into the Turkish market in 2025 through a strategic four-phase plan by Rise In, starting with developer education workshops and a mini-hackathon. This led to Hack Pera, Turkey's largest Web3 hackathon with 72 projects and $25K prizes, followed by a massively popular Stellar Sunset Party and a prominent booth at Istanbul Blockchain Week. The initiative resulted in 1,646 learners, 130+ projects, and projects advancing to Stellar's $150K Build Grant Program.
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.
Stellar processes an average of 252k USDC transactions daily, totaling nearly $50 million in volume, supporting both microtransactions and institutional flows. Analysis reveals EMEA-aligned transaction peaks, whale-dominated volume, and growing cross-chain activity via bridges like Decaf to Solana and Base. The network also faces scam token risks, but excels in real-world stablecoin money movement.
Wirex, a UK-based digital payments platform, partnered with Crossmint to upgrade from EOAs to smart wallets for global scalability. This enables programmable governance, multichain support including Stellar, and flexible custody models. The shift reduces vendor lock-in and accelerates product launches across retail and institutional offerings.
DCM launched the Transparent Network (TPN), a blockchain-based instant payment system built on Stellar, to modernize Ukraine's financial infrastructure. TPN enables banks to process payments in under five seconds with 70% reduction in acquiring costs for merchants and 60% reduction in transaction costs for institutions.
Meridian 2025, the Stellar Development Foundation's flagship conference held in Rio de Janeiro, showcased major advancements in the Stellar ecosystem under the theme 'The Blueprint.' Key highlights included Soroban smart contract launches, over $3 billion in RWA tokenizations, PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin integration, and new partnerships. The event solidified Stellar's leadership in real-world financial applications and announced Meridian 2026 in Abu Dhabi.
Hoops Finance shares their success in the Myosin x BuildOnStellar GTM Accelerator, winning best Go-To-Market Strategy by refining their messaging around Stellar-based Smart Accounts and APIs. They highlight their Meridian 2025 pitch in Rio and the launch of Trustfall: Vault Wars, a gamified DeFi experience on Stellar. The post outlines future plans to scale their innovative DeFi tools.
MoneyGram integrates Crossmint's wallet and stablecoin infrastructure on the Stellar Network to enable instant USDC remittances, allowing recipients to receive, save, spend, and earn rewards without cash pickup lines. This setup protects against local currency devaluation and provides access to additional financial services. The platform launched in just over two months thanks to Crossmint's APIs.
Range's Stablecoin Explorer provides a unified view of stablecoin transactions across 100+ chains including Stellar, and 21 bridges, solving cross-chain visibility issues for wallets, dApps, and bridges. It offers one-step integration with full transaction lifecycle tracking, entity enrichment, and blacklist integration. Teams can link users to a single explorer for improved UX without engineering overhead.
Range launches Stablecoin Explorer, the first dedicated cross-chain and intra-chain tracker for over 20 stablecoins across 100+ chains and 21 bridges. It offers real-time transaction details, public analytics, entity labeling, and integrated sanctions blacklists. Stellar is highlighted as a major hub for intra-chain stablecoin activity.
Hoops Finance's CTO Tim Baker details their indexer upgrades on Stellar for Protocol 23 support, resumable ingestion, and historical contract specs. They store raw transaction data before parsing, resume from exact pages to avoid re-ingestion, and maintain historical WASM bytecode to correctly parse upgraded contracts. This ensures precise, durable data across Postgres, MongoDB, and Neo4j for market analytics and dashboards.
Diego Yanez's alfred, an SCF-funded anchor-as-a-service platform for Latin America, evolved from a consumer wallet into a B2B infrastructure provider enabling businesses to access liquidity in local currencies and digital assets on Stellar. The article showcases how SCF support enabled alfred to pivot strategically and raise $3.5M in additional funding.
Trustless Work released Escrow Blocks, a production-ready React library that provides pre-built UI components and providers for integrating stablecoin escrows into applications in minutes. The library abstracts away smart contract complexity, enabling developers to build escrow flows from funding through milestone approvals and disputes without extensive development time.
Vanish Trade, a privacy-first trading platform on Solana, partners with Range for real-time risk screening to balance privacy and compliance. Range provides cross-chain intelligence, sanctions monitoring, and KYB/KYT analytics to prevent illicit activity while protecting legitimate traders. Range also supports Stellar and other ecosystems in onchain compliance.
Range announces a partnership with zeroShadow to integrate forensic-grade incident intelligence into its blockchain security platform. This collaboration enhances threat detection and incident response for ecosystems including Stellar. Real-time data from zeroShadow's investigations will improve Range's Transaction Security and Risk API products.
BlindPay introduces Named Virtual Accounts, allowing businesses to create U.S. bank accounts in customers' names for receiving USD payments via ACH, Wire, RTP, and SWIFT. Payments are automatically converted to stablecoins like USDC/USDT on blockchains including Stellar, with instant payouts to local currencies. This simplifies global payments, reduces costs, and bypasses traditional banking barriers.
Stellar has launched RPC integration with a ledger data lake, enabling developers to access any historical ledger from genesis to present through RPC queries. The feature uses SEP-0054 standardized format and can be accessed via public data lakes or self-hosted using Galexie, with the getLedgers endpoint now supporting full historical data retrieval.
The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #37 round awarded $1,861,405 worth of XLM to 19 innovative projects building on the Stellar blockchain. Projects span DeFi protocols, privacy solutions, real-world assets, wallets, and developer tools. Out of 76 submissions, 43 were first-time applicants, showcasing the vibrant Stellar ecosystem.
Trustless Work launches Vibe Coding, a new documentation section that provides AI-ready prompts and global context for developers to build escrow-powered applications using AI tools like GPT-5 and Claude. The guide includes step-by-step workflows, coding standards, and verification checklists to ensure production-ready code.
Trustless Work presents a modular toolkit for integrating escrow functionality into products, featuring an API, Next.js SDK, Back Office dApp, Demo Lab, and Escrow Viewer that can be combined to launch escrow flows in a day.
Templar Protocol, a decentralized lending platform, published its roadmap for expanding Cypher Lending across multiple blockchains. Starting with Bitcoin and Ethereum in Q2 2025, the protocol plans to add Stellar, Solana, Cardano, and dozens more chains through 2026, with privacy features and chain abstraction.