DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
The Stellar Community Fund has distributed over $10M in XLM to 130+ projects across 10 review rounds and is scaling up funding by five times. The article provides eight key guidelines for submitting successful SCF proposals, emphasizing ecosystem impact, clear deliverables, and deep Stellar/Soroban integration.
RPCiege: Siege 5, Space Continuum launches December 4th with four Soroban smart contract challenges focused on state archival. Players can earn NFT cards and XLM rewards (up to 500 XLM for first place on each skirmish).
The Stellar Development Foundation announced the winners of Sorobanathon: Road to Mainnet, a month-long virtual hackathon held September-October 2023. Four projects were awarded: Cowchain Farm (gaming), Divify (expense management), Kwickbit & Paltalabs (compliance), and Soro-Shark (tokenization), with SDF planning additional hackathons for 2024.
The Stellar Development Foundation submitted a comprehensive response to the French financial regulator AMF's DeFi discussion paper, advocating for regulatory frameworks that balance innovation with consumer protection through open source technology and decentralization principles.
Stellar's Protocol 20 upgrade, which enables Soroban smart contracts on Mainnet, is approaching a validator vote. The upgrade implements 12 Core Advancement Proposals and unlocks new possibilities for developers while maintaining Stellar's existing capabilities.
The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) has launched its fifth iteration with major upgrades including Neural Quorum Governance, a new reputation-based voting mechanism built on Soroban, and a redesigned website with improved transparency and user experience. The updated award structure now offers Activation Awards (up to $50K) for new projects and Community Awards (up to $100K) for continued development.
RPCiege: Axe & Ember is a text-based adventure game built on Soroban smart contracts. Getting started guides show how to play via Gitpod, GitHub Codespaces, or local CLI setup, with NFT rewards available for players who connect a Stellar wallet.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q3 2023 report highlighting major progress on its roadmap, including Soroban's advancement toward Mainnet launch, security partnerships with Certora, enhancements to the Anchor Platform and Wallet SDK, and significant ecosystem milestones like Circle's EURC stablecoin launch and MoneyGram's planned wallet integration.
The Stellar Development Foundation highlights five outstanding submissions from the Sorobounty Spectacular program, a content bounty initiative that encouraged developers to build Soroban dapps with educational tutorials. Featured projects include a regulated assets dapp, a snooker game, a farming game, a payment streaming app, and a Bitcoin price oracle.
Stellar is launching Soroban, a smart-contract platform built with Rust and WebAssembly, to compete with Ethereum and other chains. The upgrade, expected by year-end, includes a $100M adoption fund and partnership with Certora for security verification.
Stellar Development Foundation partners with Certora to conduct security audits for Soroban, its upcoming WebAssembly-based smart contracts platform. The formal verification tools will provide continuous integration security checks as the platform approaches mainnet launch in early 2025.
Stellar's Testnet upgraded to Protocol 20 on September 20, enabling Soroban smart contract support. Developers can now test DeFi applications in a sandbox environment, with Mainnet upgrade expected before year-end. This unlocks cash-to-DeFi opportunities through partnerships like Moneygram.
This article explains the importance of swap functionality and Automated Market Makers (AMMs) for financial inclusion, detailing how AMMs work, their advantages, and challenges like impermanent loss. It highlights how Soroban smart contracts on Stellar enable developers to build sophisticated AMM protocols for trustless, incentivized liquidity provision.
AssetDesk has secured an R&D grant from the Stellar Community Fund to develop the AssetDesk protocol, a new money markets protocol for Stellar's Soroban smart contracts platform. The protocol enables decentralized borrowing and lending with features like margin trading, flash loans, NFT lending, and stablecoin markets. It aims to enhance capital efficiency in Stellar's DeFi ecosystem.
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.
Soroban's fee structure uses granular resource metering to price compute, memory, and storage independently, enabling more efficient block utilization and lower validator costs than traditional gas-based systems like Ethereum's.
This educational article explains blockchain oracles as bridges between smart contracts and real-world data, covering their types, decentralization levels, and the oracle problem. It highlights oracle use cases in DeFi and mentions Soroban as Stellar's native smart contracts platform.
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.
The Stellar Development Foundation outlines seven current and upcoming developer programs for Soroban, ranging from content bounties and hackathons to educational challenges and coding puzzles, with awards up to $150,000 XLM for builders creating end-to-end products.
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.
Scalps leverages Soroban smart contracts on Stellar to power a loyalty management system for merchants worldwide, using the POINTS token for discounts and minting branded Loyalty NFTs. These NFTs include Discount, VIP Membership, Event Access, and Collectible types, each with specific smart contract features for minting, validation, and benefit application. The system optimizes storage with IPFS and Soroban storage types to manage fees effectively.
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.
RPCiege is a series of Soroban smart contract coding puzzles that teach Rust fundamentals through gamified challenges. Players complete skirmishes to earn digital collectible cards, with eight challenges released so far covering contract invocation, string types, testing, RPC queries, callbacks, RNG, and byte array operations.
Aquarius announces participation in Stellar Community Fund round 15 to develop Soroban-powered AMMs on the Stellar network. The project aims to create Uniswap v2-style smart contracts, advanced AMM types, and AQUA reward distribution on Soroban futurenet. This builds on Aquarius' established liquidity incentivization system, which has distributed over $2.25M in rewards.
