Melike Keçelioğlu's Vestellar is a native token streaming and vesting protocol built on Stellar, designed to automate investor vesting schedules, contributor payments, ecosystem grants, and payroll through programmable smart contracts. Her background in traditional finance shaped the focus on making digital asset distribution programmable, transparent, and capital efficient, addressing a need she observed across every blockchain ecosystem. The MVP was built and funded during Rise In's Stellar InstAward program.
Melike Keçelioğlu started her career in traditional finance at Borsa İstanbul, giving her deep understanding of treasury operations, settlement, and institutional workflows. When she entered Web3 and joined Piku, she found teams across the ecosystem facing the same problem: no reliable infrastructure for distributing digital assets over time. Projects relied on fragmented tooling or manual processes, while vesting assets remained locked and capital inefficient. Vestellar is her answer: a native token streaming and vesting protocol designed specifically for Stellar. It automates vesting, recurring payments, contributor rewards, grant distributions, and payroll through Soroban smart contracts. Developers deploy contracts in a few steps, while recipients track and claim vested funds through an intuitive interface. The team received a $5,000 InstAward grant during the Rise In x Stellar InstAward program, validating both their execution and the market need for native payment streaming infrastructure.