Stellar's 2025 year in review showcased major institutional adoption, with 55.6 billion in payment volume, 785 million in real world assets on-chain, and key deployments from Franklin Templeton, PayPal, US Bank, and the Marshall Islands. Protocol upgrades like Whisk and X-Ray enabled enterprise-grade scale and privacy.
The Stellar Development Foundation held its 2025 year in review, highlighting transformative growth across institutional adoption, payments infrastructure, and real world assets. Monthly active addresses reached 632,000 (up 24% YoY), total value locked hit 173 million (up 127%), and RWAs surpassed 1 billion on-chain. Major deployments included Franklin Templeton's 580 million in tokenized treasuries, PayPal's PIUSD stablecoin becoming the fourth largest by market cap, US Bank's testing of digital asset issuance, and the Marshall Islands' distribution of 1.3 billion in universal basic income using USDM. The Whisk protocol upgrade increased theoretical max TPS to 3,000 and reduced smart contract costs by 70%. X-Ray privacy upgrade added zero-knowledge cryptography primitives. Developer community nearly tripled with 171% growth. SDF outlined 2026 priorities: accelerating asset adoption, enabling enterprise adoption, and advancing core network capabilities.