DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
The Stellar Development Foundation explains the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) through a detailed walkthrough of how distributed consensus works. The article covers quorums, federated voting, nomination and ballot protocols, and provides a concrete example of how nodes reach agreement on transaction sets.
The Stellar Monthly Roundup for September 2019 covers ecosystem updates including collaborations, AMAs, new hires at SDF, developer releases, community fund proposals, and ecosystem projects like Cowrie Systems and Bitbond. Highlights include the upcoming Meridian conference in Mexico City and a proposal to disable inflation. New features on stellarbeat.io and protocol upgrades prepare the network for future improvements.
Stellar has released Horizon v0.22.1 with support for Stellar-core v12.0.0 and Protocol 12. This update introduces path_payment_strict_send offers and disables the inflation mechanism. Users are urged to update their software ahead of the public network upgrade vote on October 28, 2019.
Stellar-core v12.0.0 and Horizon v0.21.0 have been released with significant protocol upgrades. The core release implements three Core Advancement Proposals including PATH_PAYMENT_STRICT_SEND, bucket list optimizations, and inflation mechanism disabling, with a validator vote scheduled for October 28th.
The Stellar Development Foundation proposes disabling the inflation mechanism in Stellar protocol v12, arguing it no longer benefits ecosystem projects and creates scalability issues. Validators will vote on the change, scheduled for October 28, 2019.
Stellar Development Foundation launched a redesigned stellar.org website featuring improved developer tools, clearer messaging about the network's capabilities in asset issuance and payments, and a new interactive Runkit for getting started.
Stellar, Ethereum, Tezos, Oasis, and NEAR foundations partnered with IDEO CoLab and CoinList on a hackathon running Aug 5-Sept 22 focused on building user-friendly blockchain applications. Teams compete to simplify crypto UX and drive mainstream adoption, with prizes up to $10,000.
Stellar Development Foundation released stellar-core v11.2 with automatic quorum configuration and a quorum intersection checker to help validators manage Byzantine Agreement Systems more easily and safely.
Stellar public network Protocol 11 upgrade scheduled for June 10, 2019 at 1600 UTC. Developers must upgrade SDKs, Horizon instances, and Stellar Core to ensure compatibility.
On May 15th, the Stellar network halted for 67 minutes due to consensus failure, but the ledger state remained safe and consistent. The outage revealed the need for better validator monitoring, faster restart procedures, and improved community standards around validator maintenance and configuration.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced a new ticker API providing real-time market data about assets, markets, and issuers on the Stellar Network. The API offers enhanced functionality including OHLC values, orderbook statistics, and a GraphQL interface, with the previous SDF-hosted ticker instance decommissioned on January 3, 2024.
Stellar Development Foundation announces ZkVM, an experimental zero-knowledge virtual machine for scalable and confidential smart contracts. The research explores sidechain architectures to enhance Stellar with privacy features and flexible contract capabilities.
The Stellar Development Foundation announces the release of a new Go SDK for the Stellar network, featuring horizonclient for Horizon server access and txnbuild for transaction construction. This is the third official SDK alongside JavaScript and Java, designed with Go-specific idioms and improved developer experience.
Stellar suffered a critical inflation bug in April 2017 where an attacker exploited the merge function to create 2.2 billion XLM (worth ~$10M at the time). The SDF patched the bug, disclosed it in release notes, and burned equivalent XLM from reserves to prevent dilution.
The Stellar Development Foundation announces a new roadmap organizing 2019 projects across five teams: Horizon, Stellar Core, Product, Ecosystem, and Organization. The roadmap will eventually become a living document tracking progress on multiple initiatives.
SatoshiPay received a $1 million grant from the Stellar Development Foundation to expand micropayments adoption beyond publishing into gaming, tipping, and other industries through a marketing program offering up to $100,000 grants to companies implementing paywalls.
A 2019 blog post explaining Stellar's Surge Pricing mechanism during a period of high network congestion. The post clarifies that the network is functioning as designed, describes how fees work during peak activity, and outlines SDF's scaling efforts.
Jed McCaleb, creator of Stellar, discusses the project's 2018 emergence as a mature blockchain platform after years of obscurity, highlighting partnerships with IBM and Blockchain.com, the Chain acquisition, and his vision for Stellar as a payments protocol connecting financial institutions.
SDF announces the Stellar Developer Program, replacing the Build Challenge format with monthly funding for long-term projects, plus new wallet guidelines and a developer mailing list to improve ecosystem collaboration.
Stellar Development Foundation announces three major lumen distribution initiatives: the Stellar Community Fund for community-voted grants, updates to the Partnership Grant Program which has funded 34 companies, and launch of an Academic Research Program for blockchain research.
The 7th Stellar Build Challenge concluded with 107 submissions and 3.52M lumens in total awards. StellarGuard and dotnet-stellar-sdk contributions won top honors, with 53 projects receiving recognition across multiple categories including wallets, SDKs, tutorials, and trading applications.
Stellar Build Challenge 7 launches with two submission routes: contributing to open-source Stellar projects or building one of four new cornerstone apps (quorum explorer, trade bot maker, social trading, peer-to-peer wallet). Submissions open June 1st with awards based on merit.
The 6th Stellar Build Challenge concluded with record submissions and a 5x prize pool increase to 2.7M XLM. Winners include Soneso's iOS SDK, Stellarport.io exchange, and Python SDK documentation improvements, with 113 total projects receiving awards.
Stellar Development Foundation released a formal specification for adopting Lightning Network technology to improve transaction scalability. The roadmap targets testnet launch by April 1 and production implementation by autumn, addressing demands from partners like Kik and IBM.
Mobius Network raised $39 million in an ICO on Stellar, hitting its hard cap in just two hours. The startup chose Stellar over Ethereum due to speed, cost, and security concerns, positioning itself to make crypto integration easy for traditional tech companies.
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.
Lightyear.io counsel Em Lindsay clarifies three common misconceptions about ICO legal compliance: utility tokens can still be securities, the Howey test isn't the only framework courts use, and regulatory compliance extends beyond securities law to taxes, consumer protection, and AML requirements.
