Stellar Ecosystem
News

Stellar Development Foundation is sponsoring SXSW's Finance 3.0 summit from March 11-13, hosting a 48-hour NFT hackathon, workshops, and panels on DAOs, DeFi, NFTs, and digital assets with industry leaders.

Stellar is a blockchain focused on cross-border remittances and peer-to-peer payments, powered by the XLM token. Founded by Jed McCaleb, it differs from Ripple by targeting individuals rather than banks, enabling transactions in seconds for pennies while integrating with traditional financial systems through anchors and partnerships.

DFS Lab and the Stellar Development Foundation launched a second Blockchain Bootcamp for African startups to build on Stellar, offering $5,000-$20,000 XLM prizes and follow-on funding opportunities. The virtual three-day sprint runs April 26-28, 2022, with applications due March 27.

The Script3 team announces that YieldBlox Protocol will delay its mainnet launch on Stellar Turrets and instead wait for Stellar's on-chain smart contracts due to superior security, community focus, and feasibility concerns. They detail the decision process following SDF's roadmap announcement and unsuccessful grant proposal. The project remains committed to launching securely with the YBX token once smart contracts are ready.

Aquarius is upgrading its SDEX rewards engine from v1 to v2 following successful nine-day tests on seven Stellar markets. The v2 engine uses a more sophisticated formula considering offer size, duration, spread proximity, and fulfillment to better reward genuine liquidity providers. Testing showed reduced rewards for wash traders, more users receiving rewards, and significantly increased market liquidity.

Aquarius introduces native 'Bribes' feature on the Stellar blockchain, enabling projects to reward AQUA holders for voting on liquidity markets without custom development. Bribes are set up via a simple interface at vote.aqua.network/bribes, using any Stellar asset with a minimum value equivalent to 100,000 AQUA. Distribution begins February 28th, with a 10M AQUA launch bonus for new markets.

The Stellar Development Foundation published its 2022 strategic roadmap with three core pillars: increasing scalability and network innovation, activating more network participation, and promoting financial inclusion. The roadmap outlines SDF's commitment to supporting ecosystem growth while maintaining transparency through quarterly reports and regular updates.

One year after USDC launched on Stellar, the ecosystem has grown significantly with new payment corridors across Africa, Europe, Philippines, and Latin America, plus integrations from major exchanges like Bitso, Liquid, and Okcoin enabling faster, cheaper cross-border payments and financial inclusion.

Okcoin becomes the first US exchange to offer USDC deposits and withdrawals on Stellar, enabling faster and cheaper stablecoin transactions with near-zero fees and 5-second settlement times.

Tribal, a fintech platform serving SMBs in emerging markets, raised $60 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Latin America Fund. The company plans to expand across Latin America, building on its cross-border payment system with Bitso and the Stellar Development Foundation.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its 2021 Q4 report, highlighting major achievements including USDC integration, MoneyGram partnership for cash-in/cash-out services, $80.25M in Enterprise Fund investments, three protocol upgrades, and international CBDC pilots in Ukraine.

SDF published a guidebook for regulators on designing CBDCs, explaining how central bank digital currencies can improve financial inclusion through open blockchains like Stellar, with features like programmability, compliance controls, and privacy protections.

Muxed accounts, a Stellar feature that maps a single address to multiple virtual accounts, are now live and available to all ecosystem products. All services must support sending to muxed accounts, while custodial services should implement them on the receive side to eliminate memo-related user errors.

Aquarius Governance is a decentralized system launched in November 2021 for AQUA token holders within the Stellar ecosystem to propose and vote on protocol changes. It features a 7-day discussion phase, fees for creation and publication that are burned for deflation, and a 10% quorum requirement. Successful proposals are executed by the Aquarius Signers Guild.

BravePay introduces liquidity rewards for the BRAVE-XLM pool on Stellar's AMM to boost adoption and returns beyond the standard 0.3% fee. The program adds 10% of the pool size in BRAVE rewards, distributed daily based on individual shares. It emphasizes fraud prevention, long-term commitments, and ecosystem growth.

Brave, a top-performing Stellar token, announces a redesigned staking rewards system to eliminate fraud from previous universal and trading rewards. The new Brave Staking offers tiered APYs up to 26% for 12-month periods, with flexible withdrawals and no minimums. Monthly burns of 24 million Braves and discontinuation of old rewards aim to stabilize price and foster long-term growth.

Stellar processed 2 billion operations in 2021, with relevant assets up 11.39% and transaction volume up 2.3x. The SDF invested $75.25M through its Enterprise Fund, launched educational programs reaching 10,000 students, and passed three protocol upgrades including AMM functionality and asset clawback features.

Velo Labs and FinClusive announced a strategic partnership to enable faster, cheaper cross-border payments by combining Velo's Stellar and BSC blockchain solutions with FinClusive's embedded compliance controls for remittances and value transfers.

Tribal Credit, Bitso, and the Stellar Development Foundation partnered to launch a cross-border B2B payment platform enabling Mexican businesses to send payments in pesos to the U.S. and receive dollars, leveraging Stellar's blockchain network for faster, cheaper transactions.

Tribal Credit, Bitso, and the Stellar Development Foundation launched a cross-border payment system enabling SMBs in Mexico and the U.S. to transact using USDC stablecoins, reducing costs and settlement times for international payments.