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A documentary explores Argentina's economic crisis, hyperinflation, and heavy reliance on informal dollar markets and stablecoins like USDT and USDC. Despite economic improvements under President Milei, distrust in the formal banking system and high taxes drive continued adoption of stablecoins as a dollar proxy. The content reveals stablecoins bridging fiat and crypto in emerging markets facing currency instability.

Stellar Development Foundation CEO Danelle Dixon discusses Stellar's privacy strategy using zero-knowledge proofs and partnerships, strong growth in real-world asset tokenization ranking #2 in treasuries, and projects like RedSwan for real estate. She highlights institutional adoption by Centrifuge, Ondo, PayPal, and future scalability for everyday financial services. Dixon advocates for open blockchain networks to avoid Web2 centralization mistakes.

In this Block by Block podcast episode, Stellar Development Foundation CEO Danelle Dixon interviews Etherfuse CEO Dave Taylor about tokenizing local currency sovereign bonds as 'stable bonds' on the Stellar blockchain. They discuss how this enables cheap FX, yield-bearing local currency assets, and reduces dollarization in emerging markets like Mexico and Brazil. Etherfuse aims to bring over 100 sovereign currencies on-chain to empower local economies and interoperability.

Stellar Development Foundation announced Protocol 24, an emergency upgrade to fix a state archival bug discovered in Protocol 23. The bug affected 77 ledger entries out of 47 million; the fix will correct archived entries and unblock affected transactions. Mainnet vote scheduled for Wednesday.

Decaf and Etherfuse discuss their partnership building real-world financial services on Stellar in Latin America, focusing on sovereign debt tokenization and cross-border payments while emphasizing open ecosystem collaboration.

Developer demonstrates a zero-knowledge login system built on Stellar using ring signatures and BLS12381 cryptography, enabling users to prove access rights without revealing identity.

Stellar's Chief Product Officer Tomer Weller discusses the blockchain's evolution from cross-border payments to a booming DeFi ecosystem with smart contracts. Key highlights include partnerships like MoneyGram for on/off-ramps, recent Meridian conference announcements such as PayPal USD on Stellar, and a strong focus on advancing privacy solutions using cutting-edge cryptography. Stellar emphasizes real-world utility, financial inclusion, and metrics like transaction velocity over TVL.

Stellar's CPO Tomer Weller discusses MoneyGram's integration of USDC cash-to-crypto conversion at 400,000+ agents globally. The video covers real-world stablecoin use cases from Ukrainian refugee aid to health worker payroll in Syria and examines why legacy distribution networks matter for blockchain payments.

CAP75 proposes adding two native host functions to Soroban for Poseidon and Poseidon 2 permutations, enabling efficient zero-knowledge proof operations on BLS and BN254 fields without expensive contract-side implementations.

Pam and Willem from AHA Company introduce the Stellar Registry and Registry CLI, a package manager for Soroban smart contracts that enables human-readable naming, versioning, and simplified contract deployment and upgrades on Stellar.

OpenZeppelin's UI Builder tool for Stellar enables developers to quickly create interactive frontends for smart contracts on Stellar Mainnet and Testnet without extensive coding, featuring React components, form customization, and export capabilities.

Scaffold Stellar tutorial covering smart contract development on Stellar, including project setup, the guess-the-number contract walkthrough, and improvements like moving random number generation to the constructor and better error handling.

Developer shares updates on small.xyz, a generative AI music project on Stellar, including a modified Comet pool with dynamic fees to enable fair token distribution and a new mixtapes feature for batch collecting tracks.

Tutorial on creating and distributing tokens on Stellar using Merkle trees for efficient airdrop verification. Demonstrates building a token contract with claim functionality, using Soroban smart contracts and a React frontend.

Cyberworld launches its Auction House, a fully decentralized marketplace built on Stellar that lets players trade in-game items for USDC, XLM, KEL, or other assets, bringing true ownership and real-world value to gaming economies.

Stellar developers discussed CAP74, which adds BN254 pairing-friendly curve support to Soroban via three new host functions, and explored approaches for implementing Poseidon hash functions to support zero-knowledge proof use cases on the network.

Candace Kelly, Chief Legal and Policy Officer at Stellar Development Foundation, discusses her 17-year career spanning the FBI, DOJ, and U.S. Attorney's Office before transitioning to crypto policy. She reflects on why government expertise combined with sector experience is critical for navigating regulatory landscapes.

Tutorial on the redesigned Stellar Lab covering key pair generation, account creation, funding with Friendbot, and an introduction to muxed accounts for improved user experience in exchange scenarios.

At the Meridian event, lightning talks feature Stellar ecosystem innovators. Ondo Finance announces USDY, their yield-bearing tokenized treasury, now live on Stellar. Etherfuse introduces Tesoro, a Brazilian stable bond offering high yield in local currency, and Credit discusses remittances and financial innovation in Africa.

NetherMind's ZK engineering team presented a privacy solution for Stellar using zero-knowledge proofs and privacy pools with regulatory compliance, addressing the blockchain's transparency-by-design limitation while enabling opt-in privacy for users.

Meridian Pay is a Stellar Smart Wallet built by SDF and Cheesecake Labs that delivers Web2-like UX on mainnet. It uses passkeys for passwordless authentication, Merkle trees for efficient token distribution, and the wallet backend for fee sponsorship and transaction indexing.

Panel discussion at Meridian conference in Rio on real-world asset tokenization. Speakers from WisdomTree, Red Swan CRE, R-Chats, and Kymeta discuss RWA market growth from $30B on-chain, regulatory progress, and the importance of DeFi utility for driving adoption beyond money markets and treasuries.

Stellar core developer discusses blockchain scalability through commutative APIs and parallel execution, presenting research on batch exchange markets and machine code smart contracts to enable orders of magnitude more on-chain computation without sacrificing decentralization.

Circle's Daniel Pérez discusses CCTP v2 coming to Stellar in Q1 2026, enabling deeper liquidity and lower-cost remittances across Latin America. The integration addresses regulatory clarity and builder needs in the region.