Stellar Ecosystem
News

Stripe and Paradigm's Tempo is a new blockchain optimized for stablecoin payments, featuring stablecoin fees, 100k+ TPS, and EVM compatibility, directly challenging Stellar's established position in cross-border payments. Stellar, with a decade of proven reliability, anchors, SCP consensus, and Soroban smart contracts, offers production-ready compliance and fiat connectivity. The article compares their strengths, suggesting both could complementarily serve fintech needs.

RedSwan Digital Real Estate, a FINRA-regulated marketplace, has tokenized $100 million in commercial real estate assets on the Stellar blockchain, enabling fractional ownership and 24/7 secondary market liquidity for institutional-grade properties.

A Stellar Development Foundation Senior Marketing Advisor shares their first-month experience joining @StellarOrg to lead APAC strategy. They highlight Stellar's focus on real-world financial problems, the recent Soroban smart contract upgrade enabling complex dApps, and opportunities for founders and developers to build on the ecosystem.

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.

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.

21X, Europe's first fully regulated DLT trading and settlement system, has launched on the Stellar network as its second blockchain, enabling institutional trading of tokenized securities on a regulated secondary market in the EU.

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.

EquitX has received two awards totaling $150,000 from the Stellar Community Fund to develop its Synthetic Stocks Protocol on the Stellar blockchain. The protocol enables synthetic small-cap equities like xUSD and xTesla using collateralized debt positions backed by XLM. This bridges traditional markets with DeFi, leveraging Stellar's low-cost blockspace, DEXs, and Soroban smart contracts.

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.

Tomer Weller (SDF CPO) and Kostas Ferles (Veridise) discuss the Soroban Security Audit Bank, an SDF program funding third-party security reviews for Soroban projects. The initiative represents a proactive security shift, and Weller unpacks how projects access audits and what common vulnerabilities to avoid when building on Soroban.

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.

CHATS is a blockchain-powered platform revolutionizing humanitarian aid distribution with transparency, smart contracts, and direct cash/voucher assistance to vulnerable communities. It runs on multiple chains including Stellar and Polygon, using non-custodial, gasless smart contracts and stablecoins for secure, efficient fund disbursement. Key features include offline NFC transactions, real-time dashboards, and fraud prevention, benefiting NGOs, donors, vendors, and beneficiaries.

Stellar has emerged as the leading blockchain for enterprise stablecoin payments, with major institutional adoption including PayPal's PYUSD launch and Visa's integration. The network offers compliance-first architecture, predictable costs, and global ramp infrastructure that make it ideal for regulated financial institutions.

Metafyed, a blockchain tokenization platform for private credit and real-world assets, has secured USD 5.5 million in funding from leading investors including Block Tides and venture DAOs. The company is incubated by Cyberport Hong Kong, Draper, and the Stellar Development Foundation, focusing on SMBs in Asia. The funding will expand their marketplace, strengthen compliance, and enhance AI-powered features.

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.

The Stellar Development Foundation has made a strategic investment in Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange, to support the tokenization of real-world assets on the Stellar network. Archax has completed key milestones including tokenizing an Aberdeen Money Market Fund and integrating Stellar into its platform, positioning itself to bring institutional assets onchain.

The Stellar Development Foundation introduces the Token Transfer Processor (TTP), a Go package that simplifies tracking token movements on Stellar by automatically generating clean, standardized events for payments, DEX trades, smart contracts, and fees.