Stellar Development Foundation announced the creation of Lightyear.io, a for-profit company to handle partnerships, integrations, and commercial services, while SDF refocuses on protocol development and governance as a neutral non-profit steward of the Stellar network.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced the spinoff of Lightyear.io, a dedicated for-profit company to manage partnerships, integrations, and commercial services that were previously handled by SDF. SDF will maintain its core mandate as a non-profit: developing the Stellar protocol, maintaining the reference implementation, distributing lumens, and ensuring neutral governance. The partnership team and select staff will transition to Lightyear, freeing SDF developers to focus on protocol improvements like stellar-core and Horizon. Both entities will collaborate but operate independently with separate boards. SDF emphasized that the network remains open and free, Lightyear will have no special privileges, and other companies are welcome to compete.
