Watch + listen

Stellar Development Foundation announced USDC is now an official chain for the stablecoin, partnering with Circle. SDF also released protocol upgrades including claimable balances and sponsored reserves, relaunched the Stellar Community Fund 2.0, and expanded anchor networks in Africa and Latin America.

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.

Stellar Development Foundation board members discuss network effects as a growth model, exploring how blockchain and open networks can achieve critical mass for adoption, particularly in emerging markets and financial inclusion.

Stellar Development Foundation and Finclusive hosted a webinar on driving financial inclusion through compliance. Finclusive, a RegTech-FinTech hybrid, provides compliance-as-a-service and operates as a U.S. on-off ramp for the Stellar network, enabling secure cross-border payments while maintaining robust AML/KYC standards.

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.

Stellar Development Foundation launches SCF 2.0, splitting the Stellar Community Fund into two distinct funds: a 500k Lumen lab fund for experimental projects (4x yearly) and a 5M Lumen seed fund for viable businesses (2x yearly). The redesign introduces panel judges for initial filtering and flaggable quadratic voting to better allocate funds based on community sentiment.

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.

Tyler Vanderhoeven from SDF leads a technical workshop on implementing SEP24 (interactive deposit and withdrawals) into a Stellar wallet, demonstrating how anchors and wallets interact to enable on and off ramps for fiat currencies onto the Stellar network.

Stellar Development Foundation Q2 2020 quarterly call covering Samsung blockchain key store integration, Abra partnership announcement, Protocol 13 upgrade with Fee Bumps and asset authorization features, anchor expansion strategy, and policy engagement initiatives.

Tyler Vanderhoeven presents SEP X, a proposal for Turing complete smart contracts on Stellar via decentralized Turing signing servers. These servers enable programmable transaction creation while maintaining Stellar's safety guarantees, offering functional feature parity with Ethereum without requiring assets to be first-class citizens.

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.

Lee McCulloch from the Stellar Development Foundation presents SEP30, a key management standard designed to make account recovery user-friendly by using device keys and recovery signers instead of backing up master keys, enabling wallets like Vibrant to offer phone/email-based recovery without custodial risk.

Stellar Development Foundation hosts webinar on anchor basics, covering what anchors are, their role in connecting traditional banking to Stellar, business opportunities, and the streamlined process for becoming an anchor with available developer tools.

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 and Elliptic announced an integration bringing compliance tools to the Stellar network. The partnership enables businesses to screen Lumens transactions and wallets for risk, supporting AML, sanctions compliance, and regulatory obligations.

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.

Marta from the Stellar core team explains the Stellar Consensus Protocol, covering quorums, federated voting, the nomination protocol, and the ballot protocol. The talk uses simplified explanations and demos to help developers understand how SCP narrows down possible transaction sets until the network reaches agreement on a single value.

Stellar Development Foundation hosted a virtual roundtable to finalize the direct send SEP proposal, discussing multilateral KYC data sharing between anchors and enabling non-custodial wallets to participate in fiat-to-fiat cross-border payments.

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.

Stellar Development Foundation hosted a virtual roundtable on a new SEP (Stellar Ecosystem Proposal) for send-receive transactions, discussing technical standards for anchor-to-anchor cross-border payments, KYC requirements, and protocol design decisions with ecosystem participants from Tempo, SatoshiPay, and Kauri.

Tyler Vanderhoeven explains path payments, a core Stellar feature that moves value through the decentralized exchange by routing assets across multiple order books. Path payments enable market orders, cross-asset payments, and liquidity provision without manual exchange interaction.

Calvary Systems launched NGNT, a fiat-backed Nigerian Naira token on Stellar, enabling instant cross-border payments to Nigeria. The token integrates with Nigeria's banking infrastructure (NIBS) and is already used by payment operators like Tempo and SatoshiPay.