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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.

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.

Stellar's RWA market cap exceeded $3 billion. This week's developer meeting features Gaian, a Southeast Asia payment infrastructure startup that uses USDC on Stellar to connect crypto wallets directly to local banking rails, enabling merchant payments and cross-border transfers that settle into real bank accounts. Gaian demonstrated their V2 API and self-serve onboarding dashboard.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.