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OpenZeppelin released confidential tokens as a developer preview on Stellar testnet. The feature enables private transfer amounts and balances while keeping counterparty addresses visible. Designed for private payroll, grants, treasury management, and B2B settlement. Mainnet launch expected late summer after security audit.

Kaan hosts Yaman and Dennis from Trion Labs to introduce ZARF: a zero-knowledge protocol that lets users receive tokens via email addresses and claim them with Google login, keeping wallet identity private. The project exemplifies new use cases enabled by Stellar's X-Ray protocol upgrade.

Milan, 20, is building orbitkit.fun, a CLI tool that lets developers scaffold entire Stellar apps with one command. Winner of Best AI Dev Tool at Stellar Build residency, the tool addresses a core friction point: new builders arriving at Stellar face doc-heavy onboarding. Currently at 7,200 users, Milan is also running a web agency doing $12k MRR while studying engineering and working full-time.

Three builders discuss how Stellar Light, Stellar Passport, and Lumen Loop work together to solve the ecosystem's core visibility problem: new developers struggle to find projects and prove their contributions. The three tools form a complementary stack addressing onboarding, participation tracking, and signal aggregation.

Stellar's weekly developer meeting features JavaScript SDK v16 release, a real-world ZK hackathon ($10K prize pool, 11 days remaining), and the CV Labs + SDF EMEA accelerator ($150K grants). Guest project XCCY demonstrates its interest rate swaps integration on Soroban.

Two Costa Rican students, Sebastian and Daniel, are building ACTA, an identity and verifiable credentials layer for Stellar. The team recently secured SDF funding to develop a native decentralized identifier (DID) for the network, addressing critical infrastructure Stellar lacked. Mainnet live since January, ACTA offers API, SDK, and DApp interfaces, with real clients already using the platform for credential issuance and verification.

Alejandro from Bolivia discusses building Polar, infrastructure for onboarding developers to Stellar. He shares his journey from economic crisis to blockchain adoption, and his philosophy of building for people in emerging markets.

Two Indian developers, Surya and Saindipal, discovered Web3 through Ryzen's Kolkata hackathon community and won an Aptos competition with ZeroMove, an IDE for smart contract deployment that scaled to 3,000+ monthly users. They're now building on Stellar.

Introduction to Stellar Journey to Mastery 2.0, a 7-level learning program for building on Stellar. Video covers dashboard access, program structure, idea submission requirements, and how to navigate the progression from beginner to master builder track.

Sodax team presented cross-network execution tools at the SDF Developers Meeting on June 11. The SDK enables developers on Stellar to access cross-network swaps, lending, borrowing, and money market features without leaving their native blockchain. Sodax operates across 20 networks using intent-based execution.

GrantFox community call walks through the redesigned open-source contribution platform on Stellar. Founders showcase new UI updates, a dual-sided rating system for contributors and maintainers, and a flagging mechanism with strikes to maintain code quality.

SoroPG Academy Lesson 1 walks developers through the complete Soroban smart contract workflow, from writing Rust code to deploying on testnet. The browser-based tutorial requires no local setup or testnet funds, making it an ideal entry point for learning Soroban development.

SoroPG Academy tutorial on integrating agentic AI into contract development. Learn how to connect the Soroban IDE to external coding agents (Codex, Claude Code) via Model Context Protocol, enabling safer, more powerful AI-assisted workflows for smart contract work.

SDF's SoroPG Academy teaches AI-assisted Soroban smart contract development with human control at the center. The lesson: establish a baseline, ask AI for one narrow testable change, review the code, run tests, and only deploy once you fully understand the result. AI accelerates development without replacing developer responsibility.

SozuPay and ArcusX, two InstaAwards recipients, demonstrated Stellar smart account infrastructure and non-custodial escrow. SozuPay handles organization payments with passkey authentication and compliance configuration; ArcusX provides a freelance platform with smart contract escrow and portfolio management.

Winners from the 2026 Istanbul Build On Stellar x RiseIn Hackathon discuss why they chose Stellar for their first blockchain projects. They praise the network's ease of use, developer-friendly architecture, and fast transaction settlement. The winners highlight how AI tools like Claude and Cursor accelerated their development process, and emphasize the importance of judge feedback for refining their ideas.

Two InstaAwards recipients presented week 2 progress updates. Sozu Capital, a fintech application using Stellar for self-custodial payments and decentralized lending via Blend, redesigned its landing page and plans testnet transactions with NGO partners. ArcusX shipped critical API consistency fixes, extended its platform, and crossed 300+ active members.

Kaan from SDF hosts a Stellar Developers Meeting featuring April from Kolkata discussing Route 14, a ZK privacy toolkit for Soroban. The discussion covers Stellar's native BLS 12-381 support (CAP 0059) that makes production-grade zero-knowledge verification cheaper than any other blockchain, Route 14's architecture as a shared verification registry, and upcoming Turkey-based hackathons.

Shweta and Shomik discuss their two-and-a-half-year journey from their first Risein hackathon in Bangalore to founding Hypertron, a platform automating compliance and payments setup for blockchain businesses. The spotlight explores how community, real-time mentorship, and structured residency programs unlock success in Web3.

Circle's CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) launched on Stellar, enabling native 1:1 USDC bridging across 17 blockchains. This technical walkthrough demonstrates the implementation with working code: burning USDC on one chain authorizes minting on another. Includes open source examples and testnet demo.

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.

Educational tutorial on developing smart contracts with Soroban, Stellar's WebAssembly-based smart contract platform. Covers the 7-step process from CLI installation to contract deployment and invocation on testnet.

Ray from Sertora presents threat modeling as a security methodology for Stellar protocols, introducing the 4As framework (assets, actors, assumptions, attack vectors) to identify vulnerabilities, speed up audits, and improve protocol security before and during development.