Jose Toscano and Joseph Anthony built Freely, a non-custodial Stellar wallet integrated into Telegram using passkeys for authentication. Starting from a Dev.2 hackathon ticketing project, they pivoted to wallet accessibility and secured funding in early 2025.
This Dev Diary episode follows Jose Toscano's journey from building EntryX, a decentralized ticketing platform on Stellar, to creating Strupa Wallet at Hack Meridian. Strupa is a non-custodial Telegram mini-app wallet leveraging passkeys for secure, frictionless access to Stellar assets without traditional seed phrases. Jose, a software developer new to Web3, learned Rust and Soroban smart contracts during the Dev.2 challenge. At Hack Meridian in London, he met Joseph Anthony, a fintech veteran from Checkout.com with experience in traditional finance and cross-border payments. Their collaboration led to the rebrand to Freely, a fully funded Web3 project targeting mainstream users rather than crypto-native audiences. The episode details their development process, the technical implementation of passkeys in Soroban, and how they built a complete product in 48 hours.