Stellar Ecosystem
News

Franklin Templeton's Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use Stellar blockchain for transactions and share ownership, surpassed $270 million AUM. The fund is accessible via the Benji Investments app and represents a major institutional adoption of blockchain technology in traditional finance.

FxDAO critiques traditional DAO governance models like 'more shares, more votes' for favoring whales, insiders, and early participants, proposing a novel system combining modified democratic voting, quadratic voting, and anti-spam measures. Key features include locking tokens for proposals and votes that redistribute to participants, human verification to prevent sybil attacks, and high-threshold democratic votes for structural changes. This aims to balance fairness, participation, and security within the Stellar ecosystem.

The Stellar Development Foundation showcased Stellar's real-world utility at Paris Blockchain Week, featuring keynotes on humanitarian aid delivery via Stellar Aid Assist, Soroban smart contracts workshops, and panels on enterprise payments with stablecoins like GYEN and ZUSD.

Stellar Development Foundation launched Stellar Aid Assist, a stablecoin-based platform enabling humanitarian organizations to distribute cash aid via USDC through the Stellar network. The platform eliminates intermediaries, reduces costs to near-zero, and provides recipients secure access to funds without bank accounts, currently piloted with Ukrainian refugees.

FxDAO shares its April 2023 monthly update on building the first legally incorporated DAO on the Stellar Soroban network. They've developed a protocol compatible with Soroban preview 8, deployed webapps on Futurenet for vault management, and are progressing toward legal incorporation within 30-60 days. Future updates will cover ongoing protocol development and DAO setup.

Elliot Voris has joined the Stellar Development Foundation as a DevRel team member after years of community contributions. He discovered Stellar through Stellar Quest during COVID and has since become a key contributor to community education, Soroban documentation, and developer tools.

AMA recap with MYKOBO CEO Seyi Akin-Olugbemi, issuer of the EURC Euro stablecoin on Stellar. He discusses his background in fintech, the motivation behind MYKOBO for financial inclusion in Africa, and why Stellar is ideal for value transfer. MYKOBO app supports EURC, USDC, XLM, and AQUA, all on Stellar, with upcoming liquidity pools.

Thomaz Texeira, CEO of nTokens, discusses building fintech solutions on Stellar in this founder interview. He explains how blockchain democratizes finance globally and why smart contracts will enable programmable money for underserved markets.

Blend is a new liquidity protocol primitive for Stellar, enabling anyone to create insured lending pools with Soroban smart contracts. It provides lending and borrowing capabilities, adapting to market conditions while protecting suppliers via a backstop module. The protocol enhances Stellar's ecosystem for fintech, trading, DAOs, and DeFi applications.

Coinme integrated USDC on Stellar across its 40,000+ U.S. cash locations, enabling low-fee cash-to-digital conversions and near-instant peer-to-peer payments. The partnership brings financial inclusion to unbanked Americans through Stellar's efficient payment infrastructure.

MoneyGram won the 2023 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Best Use of Blockchain in FinTech, recognized for its on/off-ramp service on Stellar that bridges digital assets and local currency through MoneyGram retail locations worldwide.

Three Soroban projects born from hackathons and adoption programs showcase the ecosystem's early momentum. Sorobix, Chaincerts, and useSoroban.app demonstrate how developer tools and community support are accelerating smart contract adoption on Stellar.

MYKOBO has reduced its minimum crypto-to-crypto send and buy/sell values from €20/20 EURC to €1/1 EURC, making trading and transfers more accessible. This change aims to empower users of all trade sizes in the crypto economy. MYKOBO issues the EURC stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain, bridging European finance to blockchain.

Arf launched a USDC-backed working capital solution in partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation, providing unsecured short-term loans for cross-border payment institutions. Within four months, the platform deployed $80M across 800+ locations globally, generating $150M in cumulative on-chain USDC volume.

Soroban smart contracts on Stellar enable a unique cash-to-DeFi pathway through the network's anchor infrastructure and MoneyGram Ramps, allowing underserved populations to access financial services directly from cash deposits to income-generating protocols.

Litemint has launched a fully non-custodial ERC-721 compliant bridge for Stellar NFTs to Ethereum, enabling secure use as profile pictures on Web3 services like Twitter. The bridge locks Stellar assets and mints corresponding non-transferable NFTs on Ethereum, with decentralized recovery mechanisms. It leverages Stellar's SEP-39 for metadata and ensures high security without relying on central entities.