Stellar Ecosystem
News

Trustless Work explains how milestone-based escrow contracts solve the cash flow and trust problems in outsourced software projects. Instead of binary upfront/final payments, funds are held in escrow and released incrementally as deliverables are approved.

The Stellar Development Foundation published a comprehensive 2025 year-in-review highlighting major ecosystem growth: RWAs grew 172%, TVL reached $211M+ (up 95%), and the network processed 21.5B+ operations across 10M+ active accounts. Key institutional milestones included PayPal USD going live on Stellar, Franklin Templeton expanding tokenized Treasuries to European investors, and the Marshall Islands completing the world's first onchain UBI disbursement.

Range recaps its 2025 achievements in building stablecoin payments infrastructure, highlighted by the launch of Faraday for real-time routing, screening, and compliance, and the Stablecoin Explorer for cross-chain observability. The company expanded support across ecosystems like Solana, Stellar, and others, while publishing in-depth research on stablecoin usage, including USDC on Stellar. Amid major hacks and regulatory shifts like MiCAR, Range positioned itself as a leader in proactive security and enforcement for maturing stablecoin rails.

Trustless Work reviews its 2025 achievements, including completion of the Draper University/Stellar Embark program, extensive hackathon participation across chains like Stellar and Solana, and shipping production-ready escrow infrastructure. The project highlights builder adoption, enterprise pilots in real estate tokenization and private credit, and Stellar's ecosystem growth with milestones like PYUSD launch. Looking to 2026, they aim to accelerate integrations, volume, and tokenized assets while preparing to raise capital.

Rise In's November 2025 monthly update highlights record-breaking HackStellar Istanbul with 52 projects, over 250 new projects from India events, and expansion into Vietnam. Top winning projects include Stellar x402 for HTTP micro-payments, Reset DeFi yield aggregator, and Sublayer subscription manager. Globally, over 300 projects and 1,300 builders are driving Stellar ecosystem growth.

GrantFox has received a Stellar Community Fund Build Award, marking a key milestone for open-source collaboration in the Stellar ecosystem. It steps in to fill the gap left by OnlyDust's exit, offering improved discovery, coordination, and trustless payouts via Trustless Work. The award enables GrantFox to scale as Stellar's open-source collaboration platform.

Drips announced Wave, a new contribution cycle platform launching with Stellar Development Foundation in January 2026. Wave creates structured, short-term funding opportunities for open-source developers while reducing operational overhead for maintainers.

BP Ventures' StellarMesh Anchor project has won a Stellar Community Fund #40 Build Award, recognizing its role in connecting global exchange liquidity to Stellar's onchain rails. The infrastructure enables instant, compliant funding for Stellar wallets via SEP-24/31 standards. This milestone validates the project's contribution to interoperability and real-world asset movement on Stellar.

The article discusses expectations for a 2026 bear market in crypto following historical Bitcoin cycles, but argues this time might be different due to reduced selling pressure and positive developments like maturing web3 infrastructure. It highlights promising areas such as zero-knowledge tech and DeFi, alongside risks from macroeconomics and politics. An ad for Solang, enabling Solidity contracts on Stellar, appears at the end.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is launching blockchain-based wallets via the Lomalo app to deliver its nationwide ENRA Universal Basic Income program. Funds are disbursed as USDM1, a USD-pegged digital sovereign bond issued on the Stellar network and backed by U.S. Treasuries. This enables fast, low-cost transfers to remote citizens, overcoming traditional banking limitations.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced an updated mandate framework for 2025 and beyond, reorganizing its XLM holdings into four strategic focus areas: SDF Development, Stellar Growth, Product and Innovation, and Assets and Liquidity. The update reflects the network's evolution toward production financial infrastructure and real-world asset adoption.

This article describes the prototyping of Privacy Pools on Stellar's smart contracts platform, implementing a privacy-preserving protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs and Association Set Providers (ASPs) to enable private transfers while maintaining compliance standards.

Faraday, Range's unified platform, streamlines stablecoin routing, risk management, compliance, and analytics compared to multi-vendor stacks like 0x, LI.FI, TRM Labs, and Dune. It offers a single API supporting chains including Stellar, reducing integration overhead and improving efficiency for fintechs like AcmePay. The article details advantages across routing, risk, data, and maintenance dimensions.

KALE is a proof-of-teamwork farming game on Stellar that launched in November 2024 and became a major ecosystem phenomenon, driving significant smart contract activity, stress-testing the network for Protocol 23, and serving as a foundational project for composability experiments at HackMeridian 2025.

The Stellar Development Foundation is consolidating Go developer tools into a unified Go SDK, renaming the monorepo from stellar/go to stellar/go-stellar-sdk. This change aligns the Go ecosystem with other Stellar SDKs and improves discoverability by clearly separating reusable SDK components from service code.

Stellar has released Protocol 25 (X-Ray) with a comprehensive upgrade guide for developers and infrastructure operators. The guide covers key dates, preparation steps, SDK updates, and breaking changes, with the mainnet upgrade scheduled for January 22, 2026.

Stellar Meridian 2025 in Rio showcased the evolution of Stellar's blockchain into production-grade infrastructure for payments, identity, RWAs, and stablecoins. Key sessions highlighted open systems, regulatory progress, privacy innovations, and real-world applications from partners like MoneyGram, Nubank, and Ondo Finance. LATAM and Africa emerged as blueprints for financial inclusion and efficient money movement.

Drips launches Wave, a recurring monthly bounty cycle for open-source development. The first full program runs for Stellar starting January 2026, designed to attract developers, maintain projects, and grow communities.

Stellar's Soroban runtime engineers have integrated Solidity support into Soroban via Hyperledger Solang, enabling developers to write smart contracts in Solidity and compile them to WebAssembly. The Solang Playground Web IDE is now available for developers to write, compile, and deploy Solidity contracts on Soroban Testnet.

Stellar Core v24.1.0 addresses a state archival issue that caused some Stellar Events to be omitted from ledger metadata between Protocol 23 and 24. Infrastructure operators running Galexie, Horizon, or RPC need to take specific remediation steps to ensure complete historical data, while consumers of Stellar Events should audit affected ledger keys.

Bitbond launches TokenTool API, an enterprise-grade platform for creating and managing digital assets across multiple blockchains including Stellar, without requiring deep blockchain expertise. The API offers pre-audited smart contracts, multi-chain support, and comprehensive token lifecycle management for businesses and developers.