DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Stellar Quest is splitting into two components: Stellar Quest Learn, an evergreen educational platform launching today with five initial quests and NFT badges, and Stellar Quest Live for periodic competitive events. The redesign addresses community feedback about accessibility and consistent engagement.
Aquarius is upgrading its SDEX rewards engine from v1 to v2 following successful nine-day tests on seven Stellar markets. The v2 engine uses a more sophisticated formula considering offer size, duration, spread proximity, and fulfillment to better reward genuine liquidity providers. Testing showed reduced rewards for wash traders, more users receiving rewards, and significantly increased market liquidity.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced its 2022 roadmap, with smart contracts as the primary focus. SDF plans to research, develop, and collaborate with the community to implement smart contracts on Stellar while maintaining the network's core values of accessibility, security, and low fees.
Muxed accounts, a Stellar feature that maps a single address to multiple virtual accounts, are now live and available to all ecosystem products. All services must support sending to muxed accounts, while custodial services should implement them on the receive side to eliminate memo-related user errors.
Stellar Core v18.2.0 introduces a traffic-shaping feature to mitigate failed arbitrage bot transactions that have been bloating the ledger and increasing network fees. The feature allows validators to filter circular path payment transactions destined to fail while preserving healthy arbitrage activity.
Stellar Development Foundation introduces Starlight, a Layer 2 payment channel protocol achieving 1+ million payments per second while maintaining fast finality. The protocol leverages new Stellar protocol upgrades (CAP-21, CAP-40) and buffering techniques to enable high-throughput transactions between two participants.
Meridian 2021 tech talks are now available on demand, featuring SDF Engineering team presentations on Starlight payment channels, SPEEDEX decentralized exchange, Horizon 2.0, KYC processes, SDKs, Stellar Turrets for DeFi, Stellar Core, and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals.
This technical blog post details the implementation requirements and mathematical foundations for integrating SPEEDEX, a novel scalable decentralized exchange design, into Stellar-core. It covers the three main protocol changes needed, the Arrow-Debreu economic model underlying SPEEDEX, and the Tâtonnement algorithm used for efficient price computation.
Stellar launched Protocol 18 on Nov. 3, integrating native automated market maker (AMM) functionality into its Layer 1 DEX. The upgrade enables permissionless liquidity pool creation with fixed 0.3% fees, positioning Stellar as the first L1 blockchain with AMM capabilities built directly into its protocol.
Stellar upgraded to Protocol 18, adding native AMM functionality to the blockchain. This enables liquidity pools for cross-currency payments without smart contracts or high gas fees, making Stellar one of the earliest Layer 1 blockchains with protocol-native AMMs.
Stellar Quest Series 4 launches today with a new competitive challenge structure. The gamified educational platform has grown to 40,000+ visitors and 2,700+ unique accounts across three series, teaching developers Stellar fundamentals through hands-on coding challenges and NFT badge rewards.
Protocol 18 will introduce automated market makers (AMMs) to Stellar through deep protocol integration. The article explores the design decisions behind AMMs, including how they leverage existing path payment operations to avoid coordination problems and provide seamless liquidity routing for developers.
Stellar Protocol 18 introduces breaking changes including Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and liquidity pools. Developers and node operators must upgrade Stellar Core, Horizon, and all SDKs before the November 3, 2021 upgrade vote to ensure compatibility.
This article explains liquidity pools on the Stellar network, introduced in Protocol 18. It covers how constant product price curves work, how they integrate with path payments to improve trading efficiency, and their potential for future evolution.
The Stellar Development Foundation relaunched its demo wallet with a unified interface consolidating separate protocol testing tools. The redesigned wallet now supports multiple SEPs including deposits, withdrawals, cross-border payments, and regulated assets, serving both developers and non-technical users learning Stellar protocols.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced changes to its Debian package distribution for Stellar Core and Horizon nodes. Support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has ended, and operators must upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 LTS, with SDF committing to support all future Ubuntu LTS releases.
The Stellar Development Foundation announces Protocol 17 upgrade with a new Asset Clawback feature. Developers and node operators must update Stellar Core, Horizon, and SDKs before the June 1, 2021 network upgrade vote.
SDF reported strong Q1 2021 results across all strategic pillars, including USDC launch on Stellar, $6.5M in Enterprise Fund investments, and record network growth with 160% increase in payments and 196% increase in DEX volume.
Stellar network upgraded to Protocol 16 on April 10, 2021 following a network incident. Node operators must update to Stellar Core v16.0.0 and Horizon v2.1.0 to restore service and rejoin the network.
Horizon 2.0 introduces a modular architecture that decouples Horizon from Stellar Core, enabling developers to run infrastructure with significantly fewer resources, faster ingestion times, and greater flexibility. The new Captive Core approach reduces disk requirements by hundreds of gigabytes and cuts ingestion time from weeks to about a day.
A comprehensive FAQ addressing common transaction submission errors on Stellar, particularly 504 timeout errors. The article explains how dynamic fees work, surge pricing mechanics, ledger limits, and provides practical guidance for developers to optimize transaction submission and avoid timeouts.
This article explains the Stellar DEX pricing limitation for indivisible NFT tokens due to INT32 constraints and presents Litemint's solution using synthetic assets and path payments. It details how small stroop amounts cause offer price overflows and demonstrates a workaround for high-value NFT trades. The post includes JavaScript code examples for implementing bids and offers that automatically handle the limitation.
Stellar Development Foundation released an updated analytics dataset with 5-minute refresh intervals and open-sourced its data pipeline tooling, including stellar-etl and Apache Airflow orchestration, enabling developers to build real-time Stellar data pipelines.
Stellar public network upgraded to Protocol 15 at 1600 UTC, introducing Claimable Balances and Sponsored Reserves features to enable more user-friendly app development on the network.
SDF redesigned the Stellar Account Viewer with improved security features, hardware wallet support, and a new browser wallet called Freighter. The updated AV now emphasizes key management best practices and offers a better mobile experience.
Stellar is skipping Protocol 14 and upgrading the public network to Protocol 15 on November 23, 2020. The change addresses a rare bug discovered during testnet testing that could have caused validator crashes. Developers running Stellar Core or Horizon must install updated versions before the upgrade.
Stellar's SEP-24 and SEP-31 standards define how anchors integrate with wallets and each other for fiat on/off-ramps and cross-border payments. SEP-24 enables direct user deposits/withdrawals through wallet interfaces, while SEP-31 allows anchor-to-anchor bank transfers without end-user involvement.
Stellar Development Foundation announced that Protocol 14 will be skipped in favor of Protocol 15 due to a critical bug discovered during testnet testing. The public network upgrade vote has been rescheduled to November 23, 2020, with detailed upgrade instructions provided for validators, Horizon operators, and SDK users.
Samsung Galaxy smartphones now support Stellar blockchain through integration with Samsung Blockchain Keystore, enabling users to store Stellar private keys and developers to build blockchain apps for Galaxy devices.
