Stellar Ecosystem
News

Certora and the Stellar Development Foundation published a comprehensive guide for preparing Soroban smart contracts for security audits through the Audit Bank program, covering threat modeling, code quality, testing, and security tooling.

Bastian built Calypso, an AI-powered autonomous agent system that spawns trading bot swarms across Stellar DEXes using x402 micropayments. The hackathon project serves as the technical foundation for Hoops Finance's next phase, enabling realistic testnet market conditions and agent-native DeFi strategy execution.

Bitbond demonstrates how NFT-based notice delivery uses blockchain for auditable, programmable communication at scale. The platform's Token Tool enabled distributing notices to 36,000+ wallet addresses across multiple chains with timestamped records and operational safeguards.

OpenZeppelin's Role Manager uses SubQuery's decentralized indexing to provide a unified interface for managing smart contract access control across 30+ networks, including Stellar mainnet and testnet, eliminating fragmented manual processes.

Stellar Hacks Agents hackathon runs until April 13th. This guide covers 8 essential tips for building agentic AI projects on Stellar, from validating your idea and creating demo videos to setting up USDC trustlines and testing payment flows.

Balanced v2 launched with a cross-network money market and exchange across 12 networks powered by SODAX infrastructure. Users can supply crypto on one network and borrow on another with unified liquidity and free cross-network transfers for compatible assets.

OpenZeppelin Stellar Contracts v0.7.0 released with governance voting support, ZkEmail DKIM registry, smart accounts rework, and reorganized RWA module with compliance guidelines and examples.

Yardstick (Protocol 26) upgrade guide for the Stellar network with key dates, preparation steps for SDK users and infrastructure operators, and links to all relevant releases.

Stellar Protocol 25 (X-Ray) introduced BN254 elliptic curve and Poseidon hash function support, enabling zero-knowledge proofs as a first-class feature on Soroban. The article demonstrates a practical Sudoku game example using Noir circuits and Ultrahonk verification on Stellar smart contracts.

Space and Time released a guide for using SXT Studio to query, visualize, and analyze Stellar Network data. The tool supports SQL and natural language queries, dashboards, and custom explorer building for tracking wallets, transactions, and smart contracts.

Drips Wave 2 concluded with significant improvements to contributor diversity and reward fairness. Wave 3 launches March 23rd with new features including real-time Sybil defenses, AI-assisted workflows, and stricter contribution limits to prevent farming.

Rango announces its 2026 roadmap, expanding gasless swaps, intent-based execution, and AI agents across Stellar, XRPL, Solana, TON, and more. The cross-chain aggregator has processed $8B in volume and targets $10B+ by H2 2026.

Coinbase has released x402, an open protocol that leverages the long-unused HTTP 402 status code to enable native web payments. By integrating Stellar's fast, low-cost settlement layer, x402 enables micropayments and direct machine-to-machine transactions without intermediaries.

A CUDA-powered beam search achieved 1.08M points on KALIEN (Asteroids) with zero deaths, verified on-chain via zero-knowledge proof on Stellar.

A comprehensive technical exploration of privacy-preserving trading mechanisms on Stellar, comparing zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and trusted execution environments. The authors built working prototypes using MPC and TEE approaches, with TEEs emerging as the most practical solution for production systems.

Hoops Finance released a major authentication update enabling passkey-controlled smart accounts on Soroban, allowing users to authorize DeFi operations via biometric authentication without seed phrases or browser extensions. The founder detailed months of foundational work building the custom authentication layer, demonstrating a complete DeFi lifecycle from account creation through multi-protocol atomic deposits and withdrawals.

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.

A technical guide demonstrating how to integrate Noir zero-knowledge circuits with Stellar's Soroban smart contracts using UltraHonk proofs and bb.js for proof generation.

Stellar Dev Skill is a new open-source tool that integrates with AI coding agents (Claude, OpenCode, Codex) to provide up-to-date Stellar development guidance, covering Soroban contracts, SDKs, APIs, wallets, security, and DeFi ecosystem resources.

Stellar's Protocol X-Ray upgrade (January 2026) introduces zero-knowledge proof verification capabilities enabling developers to build privacy-preserving applications while maintaining ledger transparency. The article demonstrates how association sets and view keys allow private transactions within compliance frameworks, combining financial privacy with regulatory oversight.

A developer guide comparing three zero-knowledge proof frameworks for the zkGaming on Stellar hackathon: RISC Zero, Noir, and Circom. Each framework offers different trade-offs in expressiveness, ease of use, and on-chain verification complexity.

Stellar Light, the ecosystem directory and analytics platform, has launched major updates including a unified Stablecoin Explorer tracking 22+ verified stablecoins, a searchable directory of 230+ Stellar projects, and an Ideas & RFP platform for builders. The platform is now positioned as shared infrastructure connecting projects, users, and institutions across the Stellar ecosystem.