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Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf discusses financial inclusion, digital payments, and blockchain technology's role in addressing global inequities. She emphasizes the need for inclusive financial architecture, mobile money adoption, and inter-African payment systems to enable sustainable growth.

Securrency's Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Campos discusses building compliance infrastructure for digital assets on Stellar, emphasizing the need for regulatory frameworks that enable institutional DeFi while maintaining investor protections and interoperability across jurisdictions.

D-Stock CEO Craig McGregor discusses how the company uses Stellar blockchain to tokenize real-world securities like stocks, ETFs, and bonds, enabling fractional investing and 24/7 trading with settlement in seconds instead of days.

Stellar Development Foundation representative explains how Stellar's decentralized network enables interoperable digital assets and payments across traditional financial infrastructure, positioning it as a common infrastructure alternative to siloed correspondent banking systems.

Dante Disparte from Circle discusses stablecoins and cross-border payments, highlighting how USDC has grown to $20 billion in circulation and addresses the 50-year-old financial infrastructure gap through blockchain-based solutions.

David Carlyle from Elliptic discusses how blockchain analytics and AML compliance are combating cryptocurrency crime. He debunks myths about crypto anonymity and lack of regulation, showing that Bitcoin transactions are highly traceable and that global regulatory frameworks are expanding to reduce illicit activity.

Radko Albrecht, founder of Bitbond, discusses fiat-backed stablecoin issuance for banks and financial intermediaries, explaining how tokenization and on-chain payments enable instant settlement and atomic swaps for securities transactions.

Simon Chantry from BIT discusses central bank digital currency (CBDC) deployment, the journey from research to live operations, and BIT's Digital Currency Management System that enables central banks and financial institutions to operationalize CBDCs and stablecoins across payment networks.

Stellar Development Foundation held an open protocol discussion on CAP 37 and CAP 38, two competing proposals to introduce automated market makers (AMMs) at the protocol level. After extensive debate on implementation approaches, the CAP committee unanimously voted to move CAP 38 into final comment period, choosing the simpler best-venue routing model over CAP 37's more complex interleaved approach.

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.

Anke from SDF presents a workshop on Stellar fundamentals, covering blockchain basics, how Stellar works, asset issuance, the decentralized exchange, and real-world applications like Uhuru Wallet and Leaf Global Fintech. The session includes live demonstrations using Stellar Laboratory and highlights a $3,000 hackathon prize pool for projects solving real-world problems.

Stellar Development Foundation hosted a panel at UC Berkeley featuring four live projects building on Stellar: CoinQuest (crypto payment APIs), Realty Bits (real estate tokenization), Uhuru (WhatsApp-based cross-border payments), and Vibrant (USDC savings app for Argentina). Panelists discussed asset issuance, interoperability via Stellar Ecosystem Proposals, and how developers can build on Stellar without permission.

Stellar protocol discussion on automated market makers (AMMs) focusing on asset authorization and revocation mechanisms. Two approaches debated: one mirroring existing offer revocation semantics, another requiring issuer opt-in for liquidity pool participation.

Stellar developers discussed two competing proposals, CAP 37 and CAP 38, for adding automated market makers (AMMs) to the protocol. Key topics included reserve requirements, DEX integration approaches, pool parameter updates, and governance for multiple pools per asset pair.

Stellar Development Foundation hosted a roundtable discussion on NFTs with ecosystem builders including Task.io, Litemint, and Stellarport. Panelists explored NFT definitions beyond the acronym, real-world use cases from gaming to certification, and technical challenges around decentralization, storage, and legal frameworks.

SDF's Q1 2021 quarterly call covered major milestones including Stellar USDC launch, three enterprise fund investments totaling $6.5M, Horizon 2.0 release, and significant network growth with 160% increase in payments and 2,798% growth in relevant asset transactions.

Lee McCulloch from SDF explains SEP-30, a Stellar Ecosystem Proposal that enables user-friendly account recovery without requiring users to manage secret keys. The protocol uses multi-signature accounts and independent recovery servers, demonstrated by Vibrant wallet in Argentina.

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.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, discusses Solid, a decentralized protocol for data ownership and control. He draws parallels between early web principles and current blockchain/Stellar efforts, emphasizing the importance of open standards, user agency, and avoiding centralization.

Howard Chen from SDF presents Vibrant, a non-custodial wallet built on Stellar for Argentina that uses protocol 13 and 15 features like fee sponsorship and sponsored reserves to eliminate user friction around transaction fees and minimum balances.

Stellar Development Foundation concludes 2020 virtual Meridian conference, highlighting 2 billion network operations, 25 live anchors, and 2021 priorities including DEX liquidity improvements, a private sidechain, and expanded anchor partnerships to drive financial inclusion.

Danelle Dixon, SDF CEO, showcased how Stellar-built companies are solving real-world financial inclusion problems across Africa, Latin America, and the US-Mexico border through remittances, cross-border payments, and access to global markets.

LightNet and Interstellar announced a partnership leveraging Stellar to enable fast, low-cost remittances across Asia Pacific. Backed by major conglomerates including CP Group and Seven Bank, the network connects 40,000+ convenience stores and 5 million agents to serve unbanked populations and reduce remittance costs from 6% to under 1%.

Tomer Weller from SDF traces the six-year evolution of Stellar anchor interoperability standards, from 2014 gateways through SEP6, SEP24, and SEP31, explaining how anchors bridge traditional finance with Stellar and enable cross-border payments.