Stellar Ecosystem
News

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.

Soroban implements state expiration to address blockchain state bloat, becoming the first blockchain to deploy this solution at mainnet launch. The design includes an Expired State Store, two storage types (Temporary and Persistent), and a rent model to prioritize important data and improve network scalability.

Soroban Preview 10 introduces new State Expiration logic to address blockchain bloat issues, along with Rust SDK changes and clearer smart contract limits. July focused on refactors rather than new features, including rethinking governance token distribution. A new Stable Liquidity Pools contract for stablecoins is in development for future deployment.

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.

Soroban is Stellar's smart contract platform launching on mainnet, combining Rust and WebAssembly to enable DeFi applications while leveraging Stellar's 8-year track record in payments and anchor network for global financial access.

EU regulators finalized MiCA crypto regulation and are working on a Data Act that could impose problematic requirements on smart contracts built on public blockchains, potentially hindering DeFi development across Europe.

Soroban, Stellar's native smart contract platform, learns from Ethereum's design mistakes to offer better developer experience. Key improvements include native XLM token integration without wrapping, built-in event emissions, re-entrancy attack prevention, checksummed addresses, and single-transaction token transfers.

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.

FXDAO announces it is the first legally incorporated DAO on the Soroban network, providing legal recognition to the project. They are developing a governance contract to manage all other protocol contracts, ensuring community approval for changes. The protocol is nearing completion and ready for deployment on Soroban once the network launches.

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.

A DAO is nearing legal incorporation and aims to be the first fully operating on the Soroban network. They've completed the Safety Pool contract, which liquidates undercollateralized vaults to maintain protocol health, but face integration issues due to Soroban preview limitations. Next steps include refactoring contracts and developing the Staking Pool.

QolaQ's mutual aid platform integrates Soroban smart contracts, leveraging parallel processing, low fees, energy efficiency, and global asset access for transparent decentralized fund distribution on Stellar.

The Stellar Development Foundation showcases four Stellar Community Fund projects building on Soroban: Qolaq (mutual aid platform), Comet (weighted AMM), FxDAO (decentralized borrowing), and XycLoans (flash loans protocol). Each demonstrates innovative use cases for Soroban smart contracts on Futurenet.

Soroban offers developers a compelling alternative to Ethereum and Solana through inclusive technology choices like WebAssembly and Rust, a greenfield ecosystem, real-world financial reach with diverse stablecoins, and reliable network performance backed by Stellar's mature infrastructure.

The Stellar Development Foundation showcased Stellar's real-world utility at Paris Blockchain Week, featuring keynotes on humanitarian aid delivery via Stellar Aid Assist, Soroban smart contracts workshops, and panels on enterprise payments with stablecoins like GYEN and ZUSD.

FxDAO shares its April 2023 monthly update on building the first legally incorporated DAO on the Stellar Soroban network. They've developed a protocol compatible with Soroban preview 8, deployed webapps on Futurenet for vault management, and are progressing toward legal incorporation within 30-60 days. Future updates will cover ongoing protocol development and DAO setup.

Elliot Voris has joined the Stellar Development Foundation as a DevRel team member after years of community contributions. He discovered Stellar through Stellar Quest during COVID and has since become a key contributor to community education, Soroban documentation, and developer tools.