Stellar's 2017 year-in-review highlights 128 merged pull requests, smart contract functionality, IBM partnership with 12 currency corridors, and growing ICO adoption including Mobius and Smartlands. The foundation emphasizes that Stellar's proven performance metrics (1000 ops/sec, 4.96s settlement) position it as a leading global payment protocol.
The Stellar Development Foundation published a 2017 retrospective emphasizing that despite market volatility, Stellar's technical performance and real-world adoption demonstrate its viability as a global payment layer. Key achievements include 128 pull requests to Stellar Core with 600+ scalability/security commits, addition of smart contract functionality, release of Bifrost for ICO token issuance, and Ledger Nano S hardware wallet support. The foundation announced a landmark IBM partnership involving 12 currency corridors across Australasia and Oceania, with IBM running 8 Stellar nodes. ICO adoption accelerated with Mobius raising $35M in presale and $4.5M in public lumen offering within two hours, while Smartlands, Kik, and SatoshiPay moved to Stellar. Transaction volume on the Europe-Philippines corridor grew 20x in three months. The foundation reaffirmed commitment to building Stellar as the protocol for asset exchange, citing superior performance benchmarks and production-ready code.
