DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Freighter, a Stellar wallet browser extension, improved initial load times by 63% from 3.5s to 1.27s through optimized data loading, aggressive caching, and smarter asset icon fetching via Stellar RPC and Horizon. Key changes include loading only essential data first, preloading others in the background, and batching requests. Future plans involve a custom wallet backend and sidepanel mode for even faster access.
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 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.
On October 9, SDF discovered a bug in Stellar's state archival feature (Protocol 23) that caused outdated entries to be archived and restored incorrectly. The network immediately paused archival eviction and deployed a patch to quarantine corrupted entries, affecting only 478 smart contract entries out of ~47 million ledger entries.
TokenOps leverages Stellar's Soroban smart contracts for scalable, low-cost token operations including airdrops, vesting, and TGEs. It offers 3-5 second settlement times, fixed fees, and real-time tracking with backend persistence. This enables efficient automation, transparency, and compliance for Web3 projects 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.
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.
Protocol 23 introduces CAP-67 events that can emit data for both new and historical ledgers. Operators must enable two new core flags—EMIT_CLASSIC_EVENTS and BACKFILL_STELLAR_ASSET_EVENTS—to build a complete unified events feed covering classic operations and Soroban transactions.
The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 scalability roadmap to increase Stellar Core's theoretical throughput to 5000 TPS through five key initiatives: Protocol 23 with multi-threaded smart contract execution, increased parallelism in Core, decoupling consensus from execution, aggressive caching for state loads, and improved benchmarking frameworks.
Nansen and Slice Analytics released a comprehensive H2 2024 report on the Stellar ecosystem, highlighting Protocol 22's launch, Galexie data platform, Anchor Directory expansion to 180 countries, and significant partnerships with MoneyGram, Stripe, and Mastercard. On-chain metrics show steady growth with daily transactions reaching 2.4M and active addresses peaking at 172K, driven by regulatory optimism and ecosystem maturation.
Executioners Esports publishes an educational guide on Stellar blockchain, covering its fast, low-cost payment infrastructure, the Stellar Consensus Protocol, and Soroban smart contracts. The article provides developer onboarding steps and real-world use cases including DeFi, NFTs, and gaming.
Stellar RPC, formerly known as Soroban RPC, has been rebranded with Protocol 22 to serve as the unified data access layer for all Stellar developers. The rename reflects the tool's broader applicability beyond smart contracts and positions it as the recommended entry point for new builders, moving away from the increasingly impractical Horizon infrastructure.
The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #30 round awarded $2.17 million in XLM to 22 projects in the first round of SCF 6.0, including initiatives for DeFi, payments, humanitarian aid, NFTs, developer tools, and financial inclusion across the Stellar ecosystem.
George Kudrayvtsev demonstrates how the Composable Data Platform (CDP) and Galexie enable efficient backfilling of Stellar RPC with historical ledger data in just 12 minutes—a task that would take over an hour using traditional captive core replay. The prototype required only 80 lines of Go code and showcases CDP's flexibility for building composable ingestion pipelines.
Stellar-core 22.1 will drop SQL support for ledger state and transaction history tables. The release introduces a new high-throughput HTTP query server with the `getledgerentryraw` endpoint as the replacement for direct SQL access.
The Stellar Development Foundation has achieved a 9x speedup in Horizon reingestion by leveraging the Composable Data Platform (CDP) with precomputed ledger metadata, reducing full history reingestion from approximately 66 days to 7 days.
Protocol 22 is coming to Stellar Testnet on November 12 and will go to Mainnet validator vote on December 5. The upgrade introduces constructors for Soroban contracts (CAP-0058) and BLS12-381 cryptographic host functions (CAP-0059), enabling more efficient smart contracts and advanced privacy features like zk-SNARKs.
The Stellar Development Foundation has launched an all-new Stellar Lab, a modernized web-based toolkit for developers to create accounts, test transactions, explore RPC methods and Horizon endpoints, and interact with the Stellar network. The redesigned interface includes mobile optimization, XDR-to-JSON conversion support, and the ability to save and share API requests.
The Stellar Development Foundation introduced Galexie, the first component of the Composable Data Platform, a lightweight application that extracts and stores Stellar ledger data in cloud-based data lakes. Galexie decouples data extraction from transformation, enabling tools like Horizon and Hubble to access precomputed transaction metadata more efficiently than relying on Captive Core.
The Stellar Development Foundation introduces the Composable Data Platform (CDP), a new open-source architecture that decentralizes data access on Stellar by breaking down monolithic tools like Horizon and Hubble into modular, configurable components. CDP enables developers to customize their data consumption patterns and infrastructure based on specific application needs.
Validation Cloud announced support for Stellar Horizon, offering high-performance Node API infrastructure with archive node data access. The service enables developers to build wallets, DEXs, and other applications on Stellar with improved performance and historical data querying capabilities.
A comprehensive technical overview of the Stellar stack. Covers the three networks (Mainnet for production, Testnet for development, Futurenet for experimental features), Stellar Core's consensus protocol, Horizon API for blockchain interaction, Soroban RPC for smart contracts, and SDKs available in Go, Python, Java, and JavaScript.
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.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced it will limit historical data access on its free Horizon service to one year of rolling data, effective August 1st, 2024. This change aims to reduce operational overhead and eliminate a centralized point of failure in the network, while directing users with longer historical data needs to alternative solutions like Hubble, third-party Horizon providers, or self-hosted infrastructure.
Obsrvr provides blockchain infrastructure solutions tailored for the Stellar.org network and Soroban smart contracts platform. Their offerings include the Obsrvr Gateway, a managed service combining Horizon API and Soroban RPC servers, and Obsrvr Nodes for customizable, dedicated instances. These tools simplify blockchain adoption, enhance security, and enable businesses to integrate seamlessly with Stellar.
Stellar's Protocol 20 upgrade, which enables Soroban smart contracts on Mainnet, is approaching a validator vote. The upgrade implements 12 Core Advancement Proposals and unlocks new possibilities for developers while maintaining Stellar's existing capabilities.
Owny is a white-label platform that leverages Stellar blockchain and AI to streamline private equity fund management, capital raising, and investor relations. The platform tokenizes assets on Stellar, enabling fast, low-cost cross-border payments and simplified compliance for alternative asset marketplaces.
The Stellar public network successfully upgraded to Protocol 18 on November 3, 2021, adding native support for automated market makers (AMMs) and liquidity pools. The upgrade required validator consensus and includes breaking changes to operations, assets, and trade precision.
YieldBlox announces updates to its YBX airdrop due to bot activity, introducing day-zero staking with a 10x multiplier for genuine users and staggering payouts over six weeks. The testnet beta saw over 472,000 YBX farmed, revealing key insights into user strategies and protocol improvements on Stellar. Upcoming changes include UX enhancements, smart contract fixes, and mainnet launch by late November.