Stellar's native asset protocol and Soroban smart contracts form a complete payment infrastructure stack. This guide walks through building cross-border payment flows from first principles: anchors for on/off ramps, the native DEX for asset exchange, and Soroban contracts for business logic including escrow, compliance, and liquidity management.
Stellar was designed to solve cross-border payments—a $800B+ market plagued by high fees (6.2% average) and slow settlement (3-5 days). With Soroban smart contracts now live on mainnet, the network offers a complete payment infrastructure stack without requiring a centralized exchange. This guide walks through the architecture: anchors (banks, fintechs) that issue 1:1 pegged tokens on Stellar; the native DEX that atomically swaps assets; and Soroban contracts that layer business logic—escrow with timeout, compliance checks, liquidity pools, and AMMs for specific corridors. The production architecture combines Stellar's native asset issuance with Soroban for programmable payment flows, indexed via Horizon API and watched via Soroban RPC. Developers now have a concrete path from problem (inefficient remittances) to implementation (production payment corridors on Soroban). The stack is live on testnet and ready for mainnet deployment.
