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José Fernandez Da Ponte, a key Stellar figure, discusses why payments is becoming a compelling use case in LATAM fintech. The ecosystem is moving beyond hype cycles to infrastructure-first thinking: companies like Etherfuse, Félix, and Meru are building on Stellar not to sell crypto, but to solve real financial problems at scale. Distribution wins when 80% of users don't know they're using blockchain.

Bermuda's government announced it will move its national economy on-chain using the Stellar network, becoming the world's first fully on-chain national economy. The government approved digital asset acceptance and investment policies, and will modify its FinTech Development Fund to support the ecosystem.

Day Zero 06 tutorial on building payment-gated servers using x402 on Stellar. Speaker demonstrates 30-line-of-code server that requires USDC payment to access premium data, and shows how to wire Claude with MCP to autonomously execute payments via Stellar transactions.

Kaan from the Stellar Development Foundation presents Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), explaining its two modes (charge and channel) for monetizing services on Stellar. MPP enables pay-per-request billing and high-frequency micropayments for agents and services, with a live demo showing how to implement paywalls for premium MCP tools.

Stellar Development Foundation Q1 2026 webinar highlights record growth: on-chain RWAs surpassed $2 billion (3x quarter-over-quarter), payment volume reached $5.5 billion (up 72% YoY), and the network now supports 10.6 million unique addresses with 99.99% uptime. Major institutions including U.S. Bank, Amundi, and Societe Generale are deploying regulated products on Stellar.

Two Stellar ecosystem projects, ArcusX and SoZu Pay, were awarded the InstaWords Award for a four-week sprint. ArcusX is building a freelance marketplace on Stellar to reduce fees and payment delays in Latin America, while SoZu Pay is developing NGO disbursement infrastructure using stablecoins and the Stellar Disbursement Platform.

A panel discussion on crypto's 2026 outlook featuring leaders from Stellar, KuCoin, Fidelity, and fintech startups. Topics covered agentic payments, tokenized real-world assets, stablecoin regulation, institutional adoption, and the need for regulatory clarity.

Stellar Developers meeting covering Q1 2026 ecosystem metrics showing 2B RWA market cap and 170M DeFi TVL, MoneyGram partnership expansion to El Salvador, Aquarius hitting 50M TVL, and 260 hackathon projects including AI agents, mobile wallets, and security tools.

Stellar House CDMX brought together builders, regulators, and institutions across Latin America to discuss stablecoins, financial infrastructure, and blockchain adoption. Key themes included cross-border payments, regulatory clarity, privacy as institutional adoption driver, and local stablecoin opportunities.

Marshall Islands government launched USDM1, a Treasury-backed token on Stellar, to distribute universal basic income on-chain. The initiative replaces physical cash transfers to remote populations across the scattered island nation, reaching 40+ merchants and enabling peer-to-peer transfers. IMF, SDF, and government officials discuss implementation and policy implications.

Tomer Weller, Chief Product Officer at Stellar Development Foundation, examines why institutional adoption of blockchain requires a nuanced approach to privacy. He argues that privacy is not binary but a spectrum, with different use cases requiring different guarantees. Current privacy solutions fall into two failure modes: all-or-nothing systems like privacy pools and L2s that lack institutional nuance, and permissioned chains that sacrifice the transparency institutions value. Stellar's response: maintain a transparent base layer while providing zero-knowledge cryptography building blocks for developers to build multiple privacy protocols. The X-ray protocol upgrade enables this. Two families of private payments emerge: confidential tokens hide amounts but show senders/receivers (suitable for payroll), and privacy pools hide both amount and parties (requiring compliance controls). Weller details a compliance menu including selective disclosure, non-selective disclosure, association sets, forced withdrawals, and clawback.

Stellar and Boundless explore how institutions can deploy capital on-chain while maintaining privacy. The ecosystem now offers multiple configurable privacy models—confidential tokens to hide amounts, privacy pools to hide identities—each with distinct compliance controls for regulated use.

Tomer Weller, CPO at Stellar Development Foundation, discusses configurable privacy as the key to institutional blockchain adoption. Privacy pools and confidential tokens enable selective data protection while preserving transparency, with implementations like Stellar Private Payments now live and expected institutional adoption in 2026.

Stanford researcher Lisa Nestor analyzed 41 million USDC transactions on Airtm to measure stablecoin performance in cross-border payments. The data shows 96% settlement within one hour, competitive fees for micropayments, and strong evidence that open networks deliver better outcomes than closed systems.

Arnald from Quantos Payments discusses their regulated e-money and stablecoin platform built on public blockchains. The Dutch-regulated fintech focuses on solving cross-border B2B settlement costs and liquidity challenges for corporates, platforms, and AI agents, recently becoming a Visa principal member.

MoneyGram CEO Anthony Suhu discusses modernizing the 80-year-old remittance company by integrating blockchain rails, stablecoins, and APIs to create instant, borderless payments. He emphasizes omni-channel strategy, customer choice, and open interoperable systems while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Stellar Community Fund hosts February 2026 Mainnet Demo Day featuring three live projects: Centive (cross-border payment infrastructure processing $20M+ volume), Rival Finance (Brazilian agricultural credit tokenization on Stellar), and ChimpDAO (NFT-linked physical merchandise with on-chain utility).

Khan from the Stellar Development Foundation explains Stellar Private Payments (SPP), a zero-knowledge proof-based privacy solution built by NetherMind that enables confidential transactions on Stellar while maintaining compliance through Association Set Providers.

Nethermind's Stellar Private Payments (SPP) brings zero-knowledge privacy to Stellar using Protocol X-Ray, enabling compliant private transactions through Association State Providers (ASPs) for enterprises and users.

Sven Walfels, co-founder of Monerium, discusses the first fully regulated e-money stablecoins issued on blockchain in Europe. Monerium offers on-chain euros and sterling backed by high-quality liquid assets, integrated with SEPA for seamless bank-to-wallet transfers and partnerships with MetaMask and Gnosis Pay for debit card spending.

Stellar processed 21.5 billion operations in 2025 with 10.3 million unique users, maintaining 99.99% uptime. Major institutions including Franklin Templeton, PayPal, and the Marshall Islands deployed real-world assets and payments on the network, with RWAs surpassing 1 billion and payment volume reaching 55.6 billion.

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.

Stellar's 2025 year in review highlights record adoption with 21.5 billion operations, 10.3 million users, and 1 billion in real-world assets. Major institutions like Franklin Templeton, PayPal, and the Marshall Islands deployed production systems on Stellar, while protocol upgrades WISC and X-Ray enabled enterprise-scale performance and privacy.

A Stellar ecosystem community event in Rio de Janeiro featuring multiple project pitches including Vansys (buy-borrow-pay app), Spectra (cross-anchor identity solution), Solos Swap (liquidity aggregator), Automated Finance (workflow automation), and discussions on Web3 regulation and RWA tokenization.