DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
The article explores the rising potential of non-USD stablecoins in DeFi, highlighting their role in global financial inclusion and cross-border payments. It discusses EVM-compatible chains and projects like Spacewalk, which bridges Polkadot and Stellar ecosystems, alongside Vortex for fiat conversions. These innovations promise efficient on-chain FX markets and reduced reliance on traditional systems.
Huma Finance closed a $38 million investment round ($10M equity, $28M in tokenized RWAs) led by Distributed Global with participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures. The funding will support expansion to Solana and Stellar's Soroban network.
zkCross Network announces its oversubscribed seed and strategic funding rounds, backed by investors including Stellar, ahead of a $2.6M public sale. The project offers chain abstraction infrastructure to simplify cross-chain DeFi with features like messaging systems, liquidity aggregation, and decentralized protocols. A detailed roadmap outlines expansion across blockchains, targeting massive user growth.
Pendulum ecosystem advanced infrastructure for traditional finance integration in August. Vortex demonstrated multi-bridge crypto-to-fiat conversion spanning Polygon and Axelar to EUR via Pendulum and Stellar's Circle EURC. Spacewalk expanded XLM bridging capacity, new assets arrived via Subwallet, and MYKOBO completed migration from proprietary to Circle EURC. Governance moved forward with three referendums.
Franklin Templeton expanded its tokenized money market fund FOBXX to Avalanche blockchain, three years after launching on Stellar. The fund now operates across multiple chains with $402 million in assets under management.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q2 2024 quarterly report, highlighting network growth to 8.4 million addresses, real-world asset supply exceeding $598 million, and significant progress in tokenization and Soroban adoption. The report showcases achievements including WisdomTree's expanded retail access, $7.8 million in enterprise investments, and $5 million in Stellar Community Fund awards to 107 projects.
Etherfuse, a tokenized real-world assets platform, raised $3 million in seed funding co-led by White Star Capital and North Island Ventures, with participation from the Stellar Development Foundation. The company is tokenizing emerging market government debt on Stellar and Solana blockchains, starting with Latin American sovereign bonds.
Huma Finance publishes a comprehensive overview of PayFi (Payment Finance), a new frontier in real-world assets that combines stablecoins with financing mechanisms to enable scalable, compliant payment solutions. The article introduces the PayFi Stack—a framework with six layers (Transaction, Currency, Custody, Financing, Compliance, Application)—and highlights Stellar's role alongside Solana in providing high-throughput, low-cost transaction infrastructure for payments.
The Stellar Development Foundation donated $250,000 to support Glo Dollar's integration into the Stellar ecosystem. Glo Dollar is a stablecoin that donates 100% of its profits to charitable causes, enabling users to support philanthropy without explicit donations through remittances and social payouts.
An educational guide introducing web3, blockchain, and smart contracts with a focus on Stellar's Soroban platform. The article provides a DeFi glossary, development overview, and highlights PaltaLabs' Create Soroban DApp boilerplate for building decentralized applications.
Taurus, a digital asset infrastructure provider serving major financial institutions, has expanded its custody and tokenization platforms to the Stellar network, joining other major players like Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and Circle in leveraging Stellar for real-world asset tokenization.
The Stellar Development Foundation hosted a Cash-to-DeFi challenge track at Consensus X EasyA 2024 Hackathon in Austin, attracting global developers to build real-world financial solutions. Five winning projects were selected, including DeFindexes, Global Rupee, RampMeDaddy, Punch Starter, and Lumen Finance, each addressing financial inclusion and DeFi accessibility.
Stellar is a leader in tokenized investment assets, enabling issuers to tokenize securities, commodities, and financial products like money market funds, ETFs, and bonds. The network offers benefits including cost reduction, operational efficiency, compliance controls, and fast 3-5 second transaction times.
A Stellar Development Foundation leader reflects on their five-year tenure, highlighting SDF's strategic focus on building a viable ecosystem through payments infrastructure, on/off-ramps, and real-world assets. The post celebrates Stellar's growth metrics and the recent launch of Soroban smart contracts as the next phase of ecosystem expansion.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q1 2024 quarterly report highlighting major ecosystem achievements including the launch of smart contracts on Stellar, $3.2M in Stellar Community Fund awards, the introduction of the Soroban Audit Bank for security, and significant growth metrics including 8M+ network accounts and $1.6B in real world asset payment volume.
Franklin Templeton enabled peer-to-peer transfers for its BENJI tokenized money market fund on Stellar and Polygon, allowing direct investor-to-investor token transfers without intermediaries. The $380 million fund now supports secondary market trading and DeFi collateral use cases.
Huma Finance and Arf merge to create a combined liquidity platform for cross-border payments. The integrated platform leverages real world asset tokenization and USDC to reduce capital requirements for financial institutions, targeting $3 billion on-chain liquidity by year-end.
Pendulum's Q1 2024 roundup highlights the launch of the Spacewalk bridge connecting Stellar and Polkadot ecosystems for seamless XLM and stablecoin transfers. Key developments include reward structures for bridge vaults, new liquidity pools on Zenlink and StellaSwap, and progress on Forex AMM powered by Nabla. Community engagement and governance updates further strengthen the ecosystem's growth.
Tomer Weller, VP of Product at Stellar, discusses the blockchain's decade-long evolution, Soroban smart contracts, and real-world use cases including Argentina's adoption and Franklin Templeton's tokenized securities.
WisdomTree, a $100B+ asset manager, launched WisdomTree Prime, a unified financial platform built on Stellar that enables customers to seamlessly manage digital assets, traditional investments, and fiat currencies in one application. The platform leverages Stellar's native asset controls and tokenization capabilities to offer 13 digital funds and a gold token.
This article explores yield-bearing assets on Stellar using Soroban smart contracts, featuring the Stellar Asset Sandbox by Cheesecake Labs. It provides detailed guides for creating and managing certificates of deposit and bonds on Stellar's testnet.
Arf, an RWA-backed working capital platform on Stellar, surpassed $1 billion in onchain liquidity volume, supporting global payments institutions. The milestone addresses a $4 trillion liquidity gap in cross-border transactions, with Arf's transparency protocol ensuring on-chain risk visibility for lenders.
Stellar Anchors serve as bridges between traditional finance and the Stellar blockchain, enabling fiat-to-digital asset exchanges, but face trust issues due to centralization. The new Anchor Transparency Node, powered by Log Store Network, provides verifiable transparency for off-chain transactions. This enhances trust, supports real-world assets, and fosters inter-business confidence in the Stellar ecosystem.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and its implementation on the Stellar blockchain. It explains DeFi's core components—including blockchain, smart contracts, DEXs, and liquidity pools—and highlights how Soroban, Stellar's native smart contracts platform, enables developers to build DeFi applications with access to real-world financial rails.
Aquarius announces updates and 2024 plans for building AMMs on Stellar using Soroban smart contracts. They've developed CPMM and StableSwap models inspired by Uniswap and Curve, with AQUA rewards for liquidity providers. A new UI and integrations are planned post-Soroban mainnet launch on January 30, 2024.
This article explains asset tokenization on Stellar, covering what it is, who can tokenize assets, key benefits like operational efficiency and transparency, and the technical process for creating digital representations of real-world assets on the network.
This article explains stablecoins, their types, growth, risks, and regulatory challenges in crypto markets. It highlights issues like centralization and past failures such as TerraUSD. Range is introduced as a leading platform for cross-chain stablecoin intelligence, trusted by Stellar and others.