Stellar Ecosystem
News

The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its comprehensive strategy for implementing privacy on the Stellar blockchain while maintaining openness and compliance. The approach combines opt-in, configurable privacy at the application layer with three key work streams: supporting research and innovation, investing in core privacy infrastructure like zero-knowledge proofs, and building open-source solutions including confidential tokens.

The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #38 round received 83 submissions and awarded $2,568,750 worth of XLM to 24 innovative projects. Funded initiatives span DeFi platforms, wallets, payment solutions, real-world applications like food delivery and remittances, and developer tools for the Stellar ecosystem. This round highlights the rapid evolution and community commitment to building practical utility on Stellar.

Range's Stablecoin Explorer provides a unified view of stablecoin transactions across 100+ chains including Stellar, and 21 bridges, solving cross-chain visibility issues for wallets, dApps, and bridges. It offers one-step integration with full transaction lifecycle tracking, entity enrichment, and blacklist integration. Teams can link users to a single explorer for improved UX without engineering overhead.

Stellar completed a mainnet vote to launch Protocol 23, introducing eight Core Advancement Protocols that enable parallel smart contract execution, faster transaction processing, and improved scalability. The upgrade comes as Stellar's DeFi ecosystem surges with institutional adoption, including Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund and Circle's USDC.

Certora organized the first formal verification contests for Rust-based Soroban smart contracts on Stellar, partnering with Code4rena and Cantina. The contests for Blend v2 and Aquarius protocols featured a 40,000 USDC prize pool and used mutation testing to evaluate specifications. They demonstrated the effectiveness of Certora's Sunbeam prover in securing DeFi protocols on Stellar.

Hoops Finance's CTO Tim Baker details their indexer upgrades on Stellar for Protocol 23 support, resumable ingestion, and historical contract specs. They store raw transaction data before parsing, resume from exact pages to avoid re-ingestion, and maintain historical WASM bytecode to correctly parse upgraded contracts. This ensures precise, durable data across Postgres, MongoDB, and Neo4j for market analytics and dashboards.

Stellar Development Foundation details major upgrades to Stellar Core aimed at achieving 5000 TPS and reducing block time to 2.5 seconds. The improvements parallelize transaction dissemination, consensus voting, and block execution across separate threads, with v22.1.0 already deployed and showing significant main thread pressure reduction.

Stellar Protocol 23, named Whisk, introduces unified events and parallel transaction processing to improve developer experience and network scalability. The protocol launches September 3rd and includes fee reductions, state archival foundational work, and configurable network parameters.

Trustless Work released Escrow Blocks, a production-ready React library that provides pre-built UI components and providers for integrating stablecoin escrows into applications in minutes. The library abstracts away smart contract complexity, enabling developers to build escrow flows from funding through milestone approvals and disputes without extensive development time.

A comprehensive guide to 'vibe coding'—using AI and large language models to assist with software development. The article covers best practices for prompting, providing context to AI models, and recommends tools including AI code editors, various LLMs, and MCP servers to enhance the development workflow.

A comprehensive tutorial on building a Stellar smart contract that uses Reflector oracle to create a EUR price prediction market. The guide covers contract initialization, oracle integration, storage patterns, token transfers, and verification logic using Soroban.

Normal announces the hiring of full-stack engineer Jay Malve to bolster its team ahead of the Normal Protocol's launch on the Stellar blockchain mainnet. Jay, a hackathon winner with blockchain experience from ETH Denver, will enhance platform usability and development. The protocol offers custom crypto indexes, trading of top 200 cryptocurrencies, and DeFi features like lending and borrowing.

Stellar's resources hub showcasing whitepapers, reports, and guidebooks on blockchain, crypto, fintech, and CBDCs. The page also promotes Stellar's newsletters for ecosystem updates and developer resources.

The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #37 round awarded $1,861,405 worth of XLM to 19 innovative projects building on the Stellar blockchain. Projects span DeFi protocols, privacy solutions, real-world assets, wallets, and developer tools. Out of 76 submissions, 43 were first-time applicants, showcasing the vibrant Stellar ecosystem.

Trustless Work launches Vibe Coding, a new documentation section that provides AI-ready prompts and global context for developers to build escrow-powered applications using AI tools like GPT-5 and Claude. The guide includes step-by-step workflows, coding standards, and verification checklists to ensure production-ready code.

Certora Prover Version 8.1.0 introduces breaking changes including minimum Java 19 and Python 3.9 requirements, default sanity checks, updated requireInvariant semantics, and dedicated commands for Solana and Soroban verifications. New features include CVL formatter, re-routing summaries, transient storage hooks, and Foundry remappings support. Users must review specs and workflows before upgrading.

Templar Protocol, a decentralized lending platform, published its roadmap for expanding Cypher Lending across multiple blockchains. Starting with Bitcoin and Ethereum in Q2 2025, the protocol plans to add Stellar, Solana, Cardano, and dozens more chains through 2026, with privacy features and chain abstraction.

Hoops Finance, originating from a hackathon demo, has rapidly grown into a leading DeFi infrastructure on Stellar mainnet, securing $150K in Stellar Community Fund grants and winning multiple hackathons. The platform boasts strong traction with thousands of daily API requests, high user engagement, and tracks over $25M in TVL. It offers risk-assessed savings, AI analytics, and tools like Comet Swap to simplify DeFi for the masses.

The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #36 round received 53 submissions and awarded $2,088,654 worth of XLM to 23 innovative projects. Funded initiatives span stablecoin payments, DeFi infrastructure, cross-border remittances, compliance tools, and Soroban smart contract enhancements. Highlights include Stables, Splyce Finance, and Uniblock, showcasing the ecosystem's growing sophistication.