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Three developers from Kolkata transition from hackathon wins to shipping production. Sachindra, Shomadeep, and Orko discuss how mentorship, team collaboration, and obsessive focus on security move projects beyond demos to mainnet. Their lesson: solo builders often stall; teams that emphasize production-readiness from day one ship live products.

Philippine developers Carl (Velo), Mark (Treasure), and Armie share their Web3 onboarding journeys and APAC Hackathon experience in a Rise In Builder Spotlight. They discuss how community support, mentorship, and hands-on hackathons helped them shift from blockchain skepticism to building live projects on Stellar.

The APAC Stellar Hackathon Grand Finale brought 30 finalists from Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam to pitch projects across three tracks—local finance, DeFi, and payments—competing for $60,000 in prizes.

Pebriansyah went from crypto educator in Indonesia to founder of ORBIT Protocol on Stellar. He won three hackathons learning that go-to-market strategy matters as much as code, and now mentors hundreds of builders via webcoding.id.

Stellar Raven, an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, ensures AI agents have accurate Stellar knowledge. Introduced at the Stellar Developers Meeting, the tool aggregates documentation, ecosystem data, and verified sources to prevent LLM hallucination when building on Stellar.

GrantFox community call #2 provides a comprehensive walkthrough of the platform's open-source contribution workflow. Covers the maintainer side: project onboarding approval criteria, repository linking and campaign registration, and detailed issue creation. Also demonstrates the contributor experience: application system with tier metrics, reputation tracking, and a newly-requested withdrawal feature to prevent stalled applications from blocking slots.

Ahmed, an international climber and developer from Yemen, shares his journey into Web3 through Istanbul's Y2 Blockchain club and work at early-stage startups. Now at Synchronicity building AI-powered trading strategies, he advocates for hackathons over traditional job applications as the path to Web3 opportunities.

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.

Piggy Wallet brings family finance to Stellar to solve inflation in high-growth markets. Parents set up USDC savings accounts where kids complete chores to earn money. Founders Sofia Vasquez (CEO) and Matias (CPO) discuss gamifying financial literacy, why family finance is more than fintech, and how B2B2C partnerships with schools could drive mainstream adoption.

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.