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Charles from SDF and Fernanda from Cheesecake Labs discuss design decisions for Freighter and Akuna wallets, focusing on solving user adoption barriers through thoughtful UX rather than technology alone. Both wallets prioritize security, clarity, and accessibility for mainstream users entering the Stellar ecosystem.

Rick from Decaf and Ali from UNDP's Alternative Finance Lab discuss real-world applications of blockchain for humanitarian aid, including scholarship disbursement in Rwanda and cash transfer programs in Colombia, emphasizing transparency and efficiency in global payments.

In a fireside chat at a Stellar event, Tomer from Stellar Development Foundation interviews Simon Baxes from Layer 0 about their upcoming integration, making Stellar the 143rd chain connected to Layer 0's cross-chain messaging protocol. Layer 0, handling 82% of cross-chain messaging volume and $10B monthly, enables native asset transfers for issuers like Tether and PayPal without wrapping risks. The integration promises sub-second, gasless swaps and universal interoperability, supercharging Stellar's payments and finance ecosystem.

Lee from the Stellar Development Foundation discusses three low-level features that power great developer tools: contract specs (embedded IDL), the Soroban runtime environment, and XDR JSON for readable transaction data.

Civitas ID, a human-centered digital identity system for displaced persons and refugees, is being built on Stellar to solve the invisibility crisis affecting 123 million displaced people globally. The platform aims to bridge humanitarian aid dependency into formal economic participation through portable, verifiable credentials.

Brazilian Central Bank, fintech leaders, and development bank officials discuss CBDC, tokenization, and blockchain adoption in Brazil. Focus on cooperation between public and private sectors, financial inclusion through PIX, and lessons learned from blockchain pilots.

A keynote on how stablecoins and programmable money can transform everyday payments through automation, spending guardrails, and yield generation, moving beyond faster settlement to smarter financial behavior.

Panel discussion on PayFi (payment finance) featuring leaders from Polyflow, Visa, ARF, and Masari exploring how stablecoin-based solutions can reduce cross-border payment costs from 4-6% to under 1% while addressing regulatory, infrastructure, and adoption challenges in global finance.

Numix presented the Diamond Proxy Standard for Soroban, enabling upgradable smart contracts with shared storage. This allows asset managers to deploy on-chain without immutability constraints, addressing regulatory compliance needs for real-world asset tokenization on Stellar.

Protocol enhancement proposals for Stellar's Soroban smart contracts: CAP 71 introduces delegated authentication to simplify multi-signer logic, CAP 72 adds contract signers to classic accounts, and CAP 73 enables trust line creation from Soroban.

OpenZeppelin developer Steve Sinkens demonstrates monitors and relayers, open-source backend services for Stellar smart contracts. Monitors watch contracts and trigger notifications; relayers execute transactions on-chain based on custom rules. Both tools are essential for Meridian hackathon participants building on Soroban.

A podcast episode explores the remittance market from the US to Latin America, focusing on why immigrants prefer physical money transfer stores despite available digital options. Felix Pago uses a Spanish-speaking WhatsApp chatbot powered by stablecoins on the Stellar blockchain to enable fast, cheap cross-border payments to Mexico. The service abstracts crypto complexity, building trust through familiar interfaces while leveraging blockchain for efficiency.

Esteban Iglesias from Paltolabs presents SourceSwap and DeFindex, two major DeFi protocols on Stellar. SourceSwap is a DEX aggregator that routes trades across multiple liquidity sources via smart contracts and APIs, while DeFindex enables wallets and fintech apps to offer yield-generating savings accounts through automated DeFi strategies.

A yield farming strategy tutorial demonstrating how to boost USDC yields from 16% to over 38% on Stellar by combining Blend lending, XLM borrowing, FxDAO collateralization, and looping cycles.

XBid AI demonstrates its flexible plugin system for data injection, showing how Reflector oracles feed price data to the AI agent on Stellar. The system normalizes prices and exposes observables like slope and freshness for strategies to consume.

BP Ventures proposes integrating Mesh Network with anchor infrastructure to enable seamless funding from 300+ crypto exchanges to any Stellar wallet, requesting $60,000 from the Stellar Community Fund to remove barriers for 100 million users.

Near Protocol launches Intense cross-chain swaps on Stellar, enabling seamless native asset exchanges across 20+ chains without bridges. The integration went live August 19th and allows users to swap Bitcoin, Dogecoin, XRP, and other assets directly to XLM and USDC on Stellar with a single click.

Near Intense, a multi-chain transaction protocol, has integrated with Stellar, enabling developers to bridge assets from over 100 blockchains into Stellar applications. The integration uses a one-click API for seamless cross-chain swaps and asset bridging.

Developer explores building verifiable, unhackable games using zero-knowledge proofs on Stellar, focusing on a Pong game integrated with Blend protocol's fee vault to distribute yield to game winners.

Developer builds a decentralized chat web app using Soroban smart contracts and speech-to-text API. The 13-line contract stores messages as on-chain events, eliminating need for traditional servers or databases.

Tutorial on earning passive income with XLM using FXDAO stablecoin minting and Blend Capital lending pools. Demonstrates strategies combining collateralized stablecoin generation with yield farming to generate 19-75% returns on deposited XLM.

Tori Samples, director of product at SDF, explores why trustlessness is a false narrative and how cultivating explicit trust models is essential for building Web3 ecosystems. She examines trust through personal, institutional, and technological lenses, then demonstrates how Stellar's proof-of-agreement consensus and real-world partnerships create trustworthy financial infrastructure for billions globally.

Enzo and Fifro from Aha Labs discuss Moonlight, a non-custodial privacy protocol for Stellar, alongside David from LumenShade, which uses zero-knowledge proofs for privacy pools. Both projects aim to enable private payments on Stellar while maintaining compliance with regulations.

Protocol 23 launches September 3rd, enabling parallel transaction processing on Stellar mainnet. Soroban smart contracts gain faster memory access and lower execution costs, while unified events improve wallet and explorer compatibility.