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Austin Rice and Marta Lakova from the Stellar Development Foundation deliver a technical deep dive into how Stellar works, comparing its federated Byzantine agreement consensus to Bitcoin and Ethereum's proof of work, then demonstrate asset issuance on the Stellar testnet using Stellar Laboratory.

George from SDF's Horizon team demonstrates how to use Stellar SDKs by building a game that decodes XDR transactions, claims claimable balances, and streams payments as incoming attacks. The talk covers the three-layer SDK abstraction pyramid: cryptography/XDR, transaction building, and Horizon API querying.

Eric Saunders from the Stellar Development Foundation discusses Horizon's evolution from 2015 to present, covering the ingestion rebuild in v1.0, the Captive Core innovation in v2.0, and future scaling plans including tiered data storage and federated search.

Stellar Open Protocol discussion on CAP 21, which enables payment channels on Stellar for off-chain transactions and improved network throughput. The CAP is moving forward to the committee for approval after technical revisions and validation experiments.

Tyler Vanderhoeven from SDF walks through Stellar development fundamentals, covering the Stellar stack, SDKs, transaction building with JavaScript, and delegated signing with Albedo wallet for non-custodial key management.

Jake Urban from SDF presents Polaris, an extendable Django application that simplifies building modular Stellar anchor services. Polaris implements common anchor functionality while allowing developers to customize and extend it for their specific needs, supporting SEP 6, 24, and 31 protocols.

Nikhil Saraf from the Stellar Development Foundation presents Kelp, an automated trading bot that solves liquidity problems on Stellar's decentralized exchange by enabling market makers, traders, and anchors to create instant liquidity across asset pairs.

David Mazuris introduces STC, the Stellar Transaction Compiler, a command-line tool that makes it easier to create, examine, and debug raw Stellar transactions without writing code. The tool translates between XDR and TxRep formats, enabling developers to test transaction behavior directly on the network.

Tyler Vanderhoeven presents Stellar Quest, a gamified technical onboarding platform launching Monday with eight challenges designed to teach developers about Stellar through hands-on tasks, XLM prizes, and collectible badges.

Devnil from SDF's Voyager team presents the first version of Stellar's data analytics system, built on BigQuery and Kubernetes to enable fast historical queries and network insights. The system powers internal business analytics and will soon support real-time data, improved observability, and public visualizations.

Morley Zai from Vibrant explains how the app handles deposits and withdrawals using Stellar anchors and the SEP-24 protocol. The soft-launched Argentina-focused app lets users convert local currency to USD tokens on Stellar through a streamlined mobile interface.

Django Polaris is an extendable Django application that enables developers to build Stellar anchor servers implementing SEP standards. The talk demonstrates installing, configuring, and deploying a complete SEP24 anchor with deposit and withdrawal flows using integrations for custom banking rails and KYC.

Stellar Development Foundation held an open protocol discussion covering CAP 23 (claimable balances for two-part payments) and CAP 33 (sponsored reserves). Teams debated predicate tree recursion depth limits, SEP 30 compatibility issues, and downstream SDK/Horizon implementation readiness for Protocol 14.

Oleg Andreev from Stellar presents Slingshot and ZKVM, a modular suite combining zero-knowledge proofs, confidential transactions, and a programmable virtual machine to enable private, auditable blockchain transactions with customizable smart contract conditions.

Stellar Development Foundation hosted the first open protocol discussion, a bi-weekly meeting to review Core Advancement Proposals (CAPs) for protocol improvements. The meeting covered CAP 23 (claimable balances), CAP 33 (sponsored reserves), protocol 13 upgrade delay, and improvements to the CAP process.

Nicholas Haraf from the Stellar Development Foundation demonstrates Kelp GUI v1, a graphical interface for managing trading bots on the Stellar Decentralized Exchange. The tool allows users to create and manage multiple bot instances with customizable trading strategies without coding.

Colton from the Stellar Development Foundation discusses best practices for building usable Stellar applications, covering Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEPs), interface simplification, and user education strategies.