Stellar Ecosystem
News

RPCiege Siege 4 launches with three new Soroban Rust coding challenges (Skirmish 8-10) designed to teach smart contract development while gamifying the learning experience with a fantasy narrative.

Soroban has achieved feature completeness after a year of public development through 10 preview releases, with over 70 ecosystem projects now building in parallel. The platform is closing in on a stable release candidate with a renewed focus on developer experience, tooling, and documentation.

The Stellar Development Foundation joined the Bytecode Alliance as only the second blockchain member, positioning itself to influence WebAssembly standards and advocate for blockchain developers' needs in the Wasm ecosystem.

Stellar launched its open-source Disbursement Platform globally, enabling fast, low-cost bulk payments for gig workers, payroll, and aid distribution across 180+ countries with real-time tracking and instant cash conversion.

The Stellar Community Fund supports 70+ Soroban projects with educational tools and developer resources. Featured tools include Soroban-React, useSoroban.app, Soroban Learn, Sorobix, SoroSorcerer, and AnChain.AI's smart contract catalog, all designed to lower barriers to entry for Rust and smart contract development.

This article outlines the essential building blocks required for a thriving smart contract ecosystem on Soroban, including financial protocols (AMMs, lending markets), data access tools (oracles, indexers), user interfaces (wallets, block explorers), and security mechanisms. It demonstrates how these interconnected components enable real-world DeFi use cases like decentralized lending.

A comprehensive guide to Rust development for smart contracts on Soroban, covering setup, language advantages over Solidity, and resources from the Stellar Development Foundation for learning and building.

The Stellar Development Foundation shared progress on Soroban's Minimum Viable Ecosystem, outlining priority building blocks like financial primitives, data tools, and wallets needed before mainnet launch this fall. The foundation is actively funding projects through the Stellar Community Fund and inviting developers to help shape the platform.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched Hubble, a BigQuery-based analytics dataset offering complete historical records of the Stellar blockchain. Hubble enables complex data analysis without maintaining full history databases, supporting large-scale computing and historical applications previously difficult to implement.

The Stellar Community Fund spotlights four SCF-awarded projects enhancing Soroban: Reflector (price feed oracle), Chainlink Oracles Relayer (VRF proxy), Elio DAO (decentralized governance), and Anchain.ai's Smart Contract Catalog (developer templates).

Tech Talks with Tomer Episode 3 Season 2 features Chad Ostrowski from Aha Labs discussing smart contract development across NEAR, Soroban, and CosmWasm. The video series hosted by Tomer Weller, VP of Product at @StellarOrg, explores innovations in blockchain engineering.

Stellar Ramps enables digital wallets to connect to a global network of anchors for on and off-ramp services through standardized integrations, allowing seamless fiat-to-crypto conversions across 180+ countries without custom builds per anchor.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched a new bug bounty program on HackerOne focused on Soroban, the network's smart contract platform. The program offers rewards up to $50k for critical vulnerabilities, with higher bounties as Soroban matures toward Mainnet launch.

Source of Tales, revived via a Stellar Community Fund #10 grant, launched early access on Windows, Linux, and Android with Stellar wallet login via Albedo. The implementation uses a NodeJS-based bridge to securely connect the game to wallet authentication without storing sensitive keys.

Tomer Weller from Stellar Development Foundation interviews Cubist co-founders Fraser Brown and Riad Wahby about building security-focused developer tools for cross-chain Web3 development. Cubist received a Stellar Bridge Bounty grant and discusses why they integrated with Stellar.

Stellar Development Foundation announced updates to the Anchor Directory, adding search functionality, contact info, and filters for SEP standards to help wallets and anchors discover and connect with compatible partners on the network.

Soroban offers developers a compelling alternative to Ethereum and Solana through inclusive technology choices like WebAssembly and Rust, a greenfield ecosystem, global financial reach with diverse stablecoins, superior network reliability, and a streamlined developer experience.

The Stellar Community Fund published guidance on three best practices for successful SCF applications: demonstrate technical expertise with Soroban/Stellar, prove ecosystem impact, and define clear 3-month roadmaps with specific deliverables.

AnChain.AI, a Web3 security firm, integrated with Stellar to provide AI-powered risk management and fraud prevention tools for developers building on the network. The integration enables Stellar developers to access AnChain.AI's security solutions from the earliest phases of development.

Stellar Development Foundation announced plans to open-source the Stellar Disbursement Platform by Q3, enabling developers and organizations to build bulk payment and on/off-ramp solutions for humanitarian aid and financial inclusion use cases.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q1 2023 report, highlighting progress on Soroban smart contracts, Stellar Core scaling improvements, Freighter wallet enhancements, and the launch of the Soroban Adoption Fund and Stellar Asset Sandbox to support developer adoption.

Three Soroban projects born from hackathons and adoption programs showcase the ecosystem's early momentum. Sorobix, Chaincerts, and useSoroban.app demonstrate how developer tools and community support are accelerating smart contract adoption on Stellar.

Christian Rogobete, a key Stellar SDK contributor known as Soneso, has developed and maintains iOS, Flutter, and PHP SDKs while working on an AssemblyScript Soroban SDK. His work aims to make blockchain development more accessible to developers across multiple programming languages.

BP Ventures has launched three new open-source crypto wallets to facilitate company integration with the Stellar Blockchain. These include a white-label retail wallet supporting key SEPs, a compact command-line wallet, and documentation for Stellar Anchor integration. The initiative underscores BP Ventures' commitment to open blockchain networks.

Soroban needs essential developer tools, financial primitives, and educational resources before Mainnet launch to attract developers and ensure ecosystem success. The article outlines key fundamentals including block explorers, security tools, oracles, and collateral-backed tokens.

This article explains Pull Mode, a feature introduced in Stellar Core releases 19.4.0 and mandated in 19.7.0 that reduces redundant transaction broadcasting between validators. By having validators request transaction hashes before sending full transactions, Pull Mode decreased computational overhead and increased maximum TPS by 72% in testing.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced the deprecation of stellar-core Ubuntu 18.04 package support in favor of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, requiring users to either upgrade, switch to Docker images, or manually compile the software.