Stellar Ecosystem
News

SDF CEO Denelle Dixon testified before the US House Committee on Financial Services on digital assets and blockchain's role in financial innovation, highlighting Stellar's use cases in cross-border payments, remittances, and stablecoin issuance while addressing regulatory frameworks and environmental sustainability.

Stellar Development Foundation introduces Starlight, a Layer 2 payment channel protocol achieving 1+ million payments per second while maintaining fast finality. The protocol leverages new Stellar protocol upgrades (CAP-21, CAP-40) and buffering techniques to enable high-throughput transactions between two participants.

YieldBlox introduces Protocol Owned Debt to eliminate liquidation cascade risks by having lending pools borrow from themselves and settle via fees, enhancing stability and capital efficiency on Stellar. It also upgrades to Growing Liability Tokens for better interest tracking and ~30% performance gains. Launch delayed by a month, with community calls planned for December.

Meridian 2021 tech talks are now available on demand, featuring SDF Engineering team presentations on Starlight payment channels, SPEEDEX decentralized exchange, Horizon 2.0, KYC processes, SDKs, Stellar Turrets for DeFi, Stellar Core, and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals.

Benkiko, a micropayment protocol building on Stellar, is evolving to a decentralized autonomous organization. Its core innovation is a six-tier tokenization economy where communities create and trade custom tokens representing any item of economic value. The model draws from economic theory around monetary demand and peer-to-peer exchange, enabling micropayments, community economies, and full token-based systems.

This article details the main wallets of the Aquarius project on the Stellar blockchain, including their purposes, original AQUA token holdings, and Stellar Expert explorer links. It covers wallets for liquidity rewards, airdrops, community DAO, voting/staking rewards, emergency fund, investors, advisors/partners, and founders/team. The transparency leverages blockchain's verifiable data for AQUA holders to monitor easily.

Meridian 2021, Stellar's annual conference, concluded with keynotes on climate and economy, a MoneyGram partnership announcement enabling cash on/off ramps via 400k+ agent locations, ecosystem builder sessions, regulatory debates, and SDF's 2022 strategic priorities focused on utility, participation, ecosystem growth, inclusion, and policy impact.

MoneyGram and the Stellar Development Foundation launched a live pilot enabling cash deposits and international payments via Stellar USDC with near-instant settlement, marking one of the fastest blockchain integrations for a major money transfer company.

This technical blog post details the implementation requirements and mathematical foundations for integrating SPEEDEX, a novel scalable decentralized exchange design, into Stellar-core. It covers the three main protocol changes needed, the Arrow-Debreu economic model underlying SPEEDEX, and the Tâtonnement algorithm used for efficient price computation.

This article explains how NFT ownership on the Stellar blockchain can be proven even in an apocalyptic scenario where services like IPFS, Stellar, and marketplaces are down. It relies on best practices from SEP-0039, using cryptographic CIDs for art and metadata, transaction reconstruction from genesis, and Ed25519 signatures. Basic math and offline computation suffice to verify ownership irrefutably.

StellarX launches a simple interface for Stellar's native AMMs, letting users provide liquidity and earn trading fees. Stellar's protocol-level AMMs charge near-zero fees and benefit from shared network liquidity, unlike other blockchain implementations.

Aquarius announces the Signers Guild to decentralize control over key AQUA wallets on the Stellar network, using native multisignature capabilities with up to 20 community members. The guild will manage 75%+ of uncirculated AQUA supply, including liquidity rewards, airdrops, and DAO funds, requiring majority approval for transactions. This initiative supports Aquarius's goals of enhancing SDEX and AMM liquidity through community governance.

Stellar launched Protocol 18 on Nov. 3, integrating native automated market maker (AMM) functionality into its Layer 1 DEX. The upgrade enables permissionless liquidity pool creation with fixed 0.3% fees, positioning Stellar as the first L1 blockchain with AMM capabilities built directly into its protocol.

Stellar launched an automated market maker (AMM) at the protocol level, operating alongside its existing order book-based matching engine. The upgrade enables liquidity pools for trading fees and makes it easier to list long-tail assets with limited liquidity.

YieldBlox, from the Script3 team, aims to address Stellar ecosystem challenges like poor capital efficiency and weak incentives by introducing money markets for lending and borrowing. It enables passive users to earn interest on deposits while active users leverage assets, boosting liquidity and productivity. Additionally, it provides fintech platforms with revenue models through yield delegation and staking incentives.

Protocol 18 upgrade vote on Nov 3rd will bring automated market maker (AMM) functionality to Stellar. SDF collaborated with ecosystem projects like Settle Network, Ultra Stellar, and Stellarport.io to ensure AMM features launch immediately upon validator approval, democratizing liquidity provision and enabling new financial services use cases.

Flutterwave launched two new remittance corridors between Europe and Africa on Stellar, partnering with TEMPO to offer cost-effective money transfers using Stellar USDC, expanding Pan-African digital payments infrastructure.

Flutterwave launched two new remittance corridors between Europe and Africa on the Stellar network, partnering with TEMPO to enable cost-effective money transfers using Stellar USDC. The expansion aims to strengthen Pan-African digital payments infrastructure and reduce remittance costs to sub-Saharan Africa.

YieldBlox announces updates to its YBX airdrop due to bot activity, introducing day-zero staking with a 10x multiplier for genuine users and staggering payouts over six weeks. The testnet beta saw over 472,000 YBX farmed, revealing key insights into user strategies and protocol improvements on Stellar. Upcoming changes include UX enhancements, smart contract fixes, and mainnet launch by late November.

Protocol 18 will introduce automated market makers (AMMs) to Stellar through deep protocol integration. The article explores the design decisions behind AMMs, including how they leverage existing path payment operations to avoid coordination problems and provide seamless liquidity routing for developers.

Grayscale Stellar Lumens Trust began trading on OTCQX under ticker GXLM, alongside new Grayscale trusts for Horizen and Zcash. This marks the first time XLM is available as a publicly-quoted security on a U.S. market.

Aquarius shares a progress update on their Stellar-based project, highlighting a successful airdrop using claimable balances that reached 272,980 wallets with over 918 million AQUA claimed. They've developed a Rewards Engine and Voting Tool to boost liquidity on the Stellar DEX (SDEX), with testing starting soon and community voting to follow. The protocol will integrate with upcoming AMMs, advancing their roadmap ahead of schedule.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q3 2021 report highlighting Protocol 18 AMM upgrade preparations, a $40 million investment in Tala for digital banking, new payment corridors in Europe-Philippines and Latin America, and Canadian stablecoin VCAD launch by VersaBank and Stablecorp.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched Stellar Next-Gen, an educational initiative partnering with universities and organizations worldwide to develop blockchain talent and foster financial inclusion through courses, hackathons, and mentorship programs.