Watch + listen

Stellar Builder Summit Sao Paulo: 12 winners announced across 6 tracks including confidential tokens, enterprise RWA escrow, regional on-ramp kits, emerging market yield, agentic payment discovery, and CLI tooling. 190 developers built for 8 consecutive days, delivering products spanning privacy, institutional infrastructure, and local payments.

Stellar Developers Meeting: expert discussion of confidential tokens. Alex Votto (SDF Product Manager, Privacy) and Jay Gang (SDF Core Engineer) answer 25+ developer questions on privacy design, compliance readiness, and technical architecture of SEP-41 tokens.

Fundable and Tansu showcase how Drips Wave contributors build essential infrastructure for Stellar DAOs and payment operations. Fundable enables streaming payments and off-ramping to fiat for Web3 teams in emerging markets; Tansu brings decentralized governance and on-chain voting to open-source projects. Together, the two projects illustrate how ecosystem tools serve both immediate technical needs and longer-term governance maturity.

Hypertron, a programmable operating layer for payments and operations, was introduced at the Stellar Developers Meeting. Built for institutional adoption, the platform provides privacy-first B2B payment infrastructure with compliance and auditability controls. The meeting also covered ecosystem updates including Stellar Quest revival and expanded community AI skills for developers.

Protocol 27 will implement CAP-712, a signature security improvement for Soroban custom accounts. The update addresses a narrow vulnerability in signature pre-image handling and introduces address credentials v2 while maintaining backward compatibility. CAP-711 makes modular custom accounts easier to build and deploy.

The Stellar Community Fund hosted its July 2026 mainnet demo day, showcasing 75 awarded projects live on the network. Featured presentations included Inference, a formal verification language for Soroban smart contracts, and Lumen Loop, an ecosystem content aggregator and project directory.

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.

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.

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.

Panel discussion at Zama's CoFHE Shop brings together privacy engineers and compliance specialists to examine how blockchain privacy technologies coexist with regulatory requirements. Speakers from Stellar, Nethermind, and Predicate discuss balancing anonymous and selective-disclosure architectures, on-chain compliance enforcement, and which use cases are production-ready today.

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.