Stellar Ecosystem
News

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.

human.tech integrates privacy-preserving identity tools like Human ID, Human Passport, and Human Wallet with the Stellar blockchain to verify humans, simplify onboarding, and enable compliance. These zero-knowledge proof-based solutions address identity gaps for the unbanked, enhancing Stellar's applications in remittances, humanitarian aid, and tokenized assets. Supported by Stellar's Community Fund, the tools are now live and rolling out progressively.

Mercury, a Stellar ecosystem runtime platform, is shifting to a Light Client deployment model that unbundles data sourcing, execution, and delivery into modular, open-source components. This redesign reduces operational overhead while preserving Mercury's Zephyr and Retroshades runtime technology and enabling third-party infrastructure operators to run Mercury services independently.

A developer shares her firsthand experience winning a track at Casa Builder México 2025 hackathon, building a Stellar/Soroban smart contract project with a mixed Web2/Web3 team despite having no prior Rust or Stellar experience. She details the technical stack, timeline, challenges, and key lessons learned about participating in hackathons.

The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 roadmap progress toward achieving 5000 TPS and 2.5-second block times through major Stellar Core upgrades. The post details the first phase of parallelization: isolating transaction dissemination to separate threads, which is now enabled by default in Stellar Core v22.1.0, with signature verification parallelization coming in v22.3.0.

Trustless Work participated in Casa Builders CDMX, a Stellar-hosted hackathon in Mexico focusing on financial inclusion, digital identity, and public good transparency. Their team built Pacto, a decentralized P2P stablecoin ramp using Trustless Work's programmable escrow, and won the event. The hackathon united Latin American builders, with strong Costa Rican representation.

The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 roadmap goal to double Tier 1 network resilience from 7 to 13 organizations, increasing fault tolerance from 2 to 4 organization failures. The post explains how Stellar's proof-of-agreement consensus works, the history of validator coordination, and the technical and organizational steps needed to achieve this decentralization milestone.

Yugo Cabrio and Changmin Cho completed Milestone #1 of the UltraHonk Verifier for Soroban project, delivering a pure Rust implementation of the UltraHonk proof verifier that enables Noir/Barretenberg proofs to be verified on Stellar Soroban. After discovering incompatibility with the Taceo-labs extraction approach, they implemented the verifier from scratch in Rust with full CI/CD integration.

Stellar Lumens surged 14.3% to $0.293 on institutional volume following the release of Stellar Core v23.0.0rc2, though the rally reversed sharply to $0.2896 as short-term traders exited positions.

Range announces a partnership with Peersyst to bring its cross-chain monitoring, security, and intelligence tools to the XRPL EVM sidechain launching in 2025. XRPL EVM introduces Ethereum-compatible smart contracts to the XRP ecosystem while preserving XRPL's speed and low costs, enabling DeFi, staking, and interoperability via IBC, Axelar, and Wormhole. Range will provide day-one support including its Cross-Chain Explorer, Monitoring and Alerts, and Trail forensic tool.

Trustless Work is participating in OnlyDust OS Wave #1 from June 26 to July 6, offering high-impact tasks for contributors preparing for mainnet launch. Tasks include escrow viewer refactors, wallet analytics, smart contract optimizations, passkey integration, and backoffice enhancements on the Stellar blockchain. Contributors can join via OnlyDust to work on real smart contracts, UI features, and dev tools for the stablecoin economy.

Trustless Work has released an SDK MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration for Cursor, enabling AI-assisted development of escrow flows. The MCP allows developers to scaffold escrow integrations directly from their editor with autocomplete, type safety, and reduced friction.

Trustless Work has released a major update introducing two escrow contract types: Single-Release for one-shot payouts and Multi-Release for milestone-based payments. The API has been restructured with type-scoped endpoints, and a new React library is available in beta. Upgraded Backoffice and Demo dApps provide enhanced UX and examples for developers building on Stellar.

The U.S. GENIUS Act has passed the House, providing regulatory clarity for USD-pegged stablecoins and enabling compliant innovation. This is a major boost for builders on Stellar, especially with USDC and new entrants like PYUSD. It unlocks opportunities in LATAM remittances and programmable payments via infrastructure like Trustless Work.

Stellar released its 2025 developer roadmap, featuring upgrades to Lab 3.0/4.0 developer tools, Protocol 23 targeting 5,000 TPS, and enterprise payment features to position the network as a major DeFi and institutional blockchain.

PayPal has launched its PYUSD stablecoin on the Stellar network, enabling native PYUSD escrows via Trustless Work. This unlocks programmable trust for gig platforms, marketplaces, and cross-border payments without bridges. Builders in emerging markets can now leverage PYUSD for milestone escrows and transparent financial flows.

MoneyGram has reached $30 million in transaction volume through its crypto-to-cash service on Stellar, operating in over 170 countries. The partnership demonstrates real-world blockchain adoption for financial inclusion, enabling users to convert stablecoins to local currency and facilitating humanitarian aid distribution.

Stellar is advancing its blockchain with a public roadmap emphasizing scalability, usability, and developer tools like Soroban optimizations, Freighter wallet, AI assistants Stella and Contract Copilot, and integrations with OpenZeppelin. It powers real-world assets with $522 million on-chain and $17 billion in volume across 70 countries. The ecosystem offers robust support via the Stellar Community Fund and production-ready infrastructure.

The Stellar Q2 testnet will reset on June 18 at 17:00 UTC, wiping all contracts, assets, accounts, and data. Simultaneously, Trustless Work v2.0 will launch on the main branch with major upgrades including multi-release escrows, API changes, and new escrow logic. Developers should prepare for breaking changes with upcoming guides and documentation.