Stellar Ecosystem
News

A new protocol launches its website as Soroban goes live on Stellar mainnet in phase 0. The protocol, developed in just 20 days since February 3rd, aims to become the de facto domain service on Soroban with free-to-use features and future DAO plans. It's been on testnet since February 4th, 2024, awaiting full deployment.

Stellar Anchors serve as bridges between traditional finance and the Stellar blockchain, enabling fiat-to-digital asset exchanges, but face trust issues due to centralization. The new Anchor Transparency Node, powered by Log Store Network, provides verifiable transparency for off-chain transactions. This enhances trust, supports real-world assets, and fosters inter-business confidence in the Stellar ecosystem.

Stellar mainnet upgraded to Protocol 20, introducing Soroban smart contract platform built on WebAssembly and Rust. The upgrade enables custom code execution while preserving Stellar's payments infrastructure and institutional compliance focus.

Dropzey is an innovative platform revolutionizing airdrops by simplifying creation and participation processes. It addresses inefficiencies through user-friendly tools, verification mechanisms, and transparency features. By integrating with Stellar and Soroban Smart Contracts, it enables automated and instant token distribution.

Velo Labs announced partnerships between its Orbit crypto merchant network and major POS providers, targeting 500,000 users by year-end. Orbit enables QR code-based cryptocurrency payments at retail points of sale with instant fiat conversion for merchants.

Yellow Card, Africa's largest stablecoin on/off ramp, is integrating USDC on the Stellar network to enable faster, cheaper cross-border payments and remittances across 20 African countries. The integration offers near-zero fees and 3-second settlement times.

BiGGER, an Australian software development company, deployed the Stellar Disbursement Platform to streamline payroll for its 100+ contractors across South America, reducing monthly processing time from 8 hours to minutes. The company now hosts SDP instances for humanitarian organizations like Casa Tochan, enabling efficient digital aid distribution.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and its implementation on the Stellar blockchain. It explains DeFi's core components—including blockchain, smart contracts, DEXs, and liquidity pools—and highlights how Soroban, Stellar's native smart contracts platform, enables developers to build DeFi applications with access to real-world financial rails.

A comprehensive tutorial on migrating smart contracts from Ethereum's Solidity to Soroban's Rust SDK, comparing the two languages and providing step-by-step examples of building a 'Hello World' contract in both environments.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q4 2023 quarterly report highlighting major ecosystem achievements including Protocol 20 support, Soroban mainnet rollout, $4M in SCF funding to 88 projects, and over $2M in humanitarian aid disbursed via the Stellar Disbursement Platform.

HoneyCoin wins Stellar Community Fund Round 21 award for launching Flights, a pioneering feature enabling flight ticket purchases to 150+ countries using Stellar assets like USDC and EURC. The award recognizes their innovative work on the Peer platform. They thank the Stellar community and tease more features ahead.

Stellar network validators postponed the Protocol 20 upgrade vote due to a bug discovered in Stellar Core v20.1.0. The SDF has outlined a new timeline with a bug fix release on February 2, testnet reset on February 6, and a target Protocol 20 upgrade vote on February 20.

Stellar Development Foundation delayed its Protocol 20 upgrade beyond Jan. 30 after discovering a bug in Soroban smart contracts software. Six of seven tier-1 validators signaled support for postponement, likely preventing the upgrade from reaching quorum.

The Stellar Development Foundation has decided to disarm its validators and postpone the Protocol 20 upgrade scheduled for January 30, 2024, following ecosystem concerns about a discovered bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0 affecting fee bumps for Soroban transactions.

The Stellar Development Foundation organized the Workshop on Heterogeneous Trust in Distributed Systems (HTDS) in October, bringing together 30 researchers to explore consensus mechanisms where validators independently choose which peers to trust—a key feature of Stellar and other networks.

The Stellar Development Foundation disclosed a bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0 affecting fee-bumped Soroban transactions, where refunds are incorrectly sent to the sponsored account instead of the sponsor. SDF decided to proceed with the Protocol 20 upgrade vote on January 30 as planned, citing low risk during early Soroban phases and the availability of mitigation best practices.

An educational deep-dive into Stellar's Proof-of-Agreement (PoA) consensus algorithm, explaining how it differs from Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake through relatable examples of quorums, slices, and topens.

This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to deploying a Soroban RPC server on DigitalOcean Kubernetes using Stellar Development Foundation Helm charts. It covers cluster creation, Helm repository setup, configuration for testnet, Nginx Ingress installation, DNS setup, and verification. Benefits include improved reliability, control, and performance for Stellar smart contract interactions.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) partnered with the Stellar Development Foundation to pilot a blockchain-powered cash assistance program in Ukraine using Stellar Aid Assist and the Stellar Disbursement Platform, reaching 167 households with digital aid delivery that achieved 100% recipient satisfaction.

Blend, a permissionless on-chain lending protocol, has launched on Stellar Testnet. Users can now test lending, borrowing, and backstopping features using browser wallets like Freighter. The protocol offers high capital efficiency, flexible pools, and risk mitigations for the Stellar DeFi ecosystem.

Nebula, a Soroban contract library built by Eiger, aims to simplify smart contract development on Stellar by providing security-audited components, templates, and a user-friendly contract wizard to accelerate dapp deployment and lower barriers to entry for developers.

Aquarius announces updates and 2024 plans for building AMMs on Stellar using Soroban smart contracts. They've developed CPMM and StableSwap models inspired by Uniswap and Curve, with AQUA rewards for liquidity providers. A new UI and integrations are planned post-Soroban mainnet launch on January 30, 2024.

Stellar Development Foundation announced Protocol 20 upgrade with Soroban smart contracts, scheduled for January 30 validator vote on Mainnet. The network will roll out smart contract functionality in three phased stages to ensure stability and performance.