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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.

SDF senior technical writer Brie Wilde demonstrates Quarterly Ascension, an on-chain game where ten autonomous AI middle managers compete for a single VP promotion. Agents transact via Soroban smart contracts and MPP. Players direct their agents through 'life coaching' or let them act autonomously. The game showcases what developers can build with advanced Stellar infrastructure.

Blend, Stellar's largest DeFi protocol, faces competing V3 proposals: Templar wants institutional RWAs and fixed-rate lending with permission pools; the alternative keeps Blend primitive, letting builders layer features on top. No governance DAO; the backstop LP market migration decides which version wins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ken Sang (Crossmint) and Bojan Barakov (OpenSettling) discuss how AI agents and stablecoins are reshaping fintech infrastructure. From smart wallets to agent-to-agent transactions, blockchain is enabling machine-to-machine commerce at scale.

A panel at Bermuda Digital Asset Week examined how tokenized funds are transforming institutional capital management. Speakers from Franklin Templeton, Coinbase, and Apex Group discussed how blockchain infrastructure cuts costs while enabling new asset classes and institutional-grade efficiency.

Stellar crosses $2.8B in tokenized real-world assets (3.5x growth since late 2025) and reaches 1,700 monthly active developers—the fourth-largest ecosystem—while DTCC announces its H1 2027 launch of tokenized assets on the network. Jose Fernandez de Ponte, SDF president, discusses institutional adoption advantages and competitive positioning.

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.

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.

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.

Stellar Developers meeting featuring Renat's presentation on zero-knowledge group membership proofs for Soroban contracts, followed by Kaan's overview of AI orchestration tools like Paperclip for developer workflows.

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.

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.

Stellar's X-Ray upgrade enables zero-knowledge privacy on its network through BN254 elliptic curves and Poseidon hashing, allowing optional privacy layers with compliance tools like confidential tokens and privacy pools to coexist with transparency.

Stellar Developer Meeting covering Protocol 26 launch on testnet, agentic payments (X402 and MPP), and a demo of NoEther, a new perpetual DEX built on Stellar with support for isolated and cross-margin trading.

Stellar Developer Meeting covering Protocol 26 testnet launch, AI agents and agentic payments (X402/MPP), $2B in tokenized RWAs on network, and live demo of NoEther perpetual DEX platform built on Stellar.

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.

Developer shares experience building Rhythm Slice, a Guitar Hero-style pizza game with zero-knowledge privacy contracts on Stellar, created during a gaming-focused hackathon using AI agents Claude and Anthropic to handle smart contract development and UI implementation.

Khan from SDF presents an AI resources guide for the Hack Plus Alep Rej hackathon in Mexico City, covering free AI setup, developer tools, composable protocol integration, and best practices for building on Stellar with AI assistance.