Stellar Ecosystem
News

Okcoin becomes the first U.S. exchange to offer USDC deposits and withdrawals on Stellar, enabling faster and cheaper stablecoin transactions with near-zero fees and 5-second settlement times.

Tribal, a fintech platform serving SMBs in emerging markets, raised $60 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Latin America Fund. The company plans to expand across Latin America, building on its cross-border payment system with Bitso and the Stellar Development Foundation.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its 2021 Q4 report, highlighting major achievements including USDC integration, MoneyGram partnership for cash-in/cash-out services, $80.25M in Enterprise Fund investments, three protocol upgrades, and international CBDC pilots in Ukraine.

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.

Velo Labs and FinClusive announced a strategic partnership to enable faster, cheaper cross-border payments by combining Velo's Stellar and BSC blockchain solutions with FinClusive's embedded compliance controls for remittances and value transfers.

Tribal Credit, Bitso, and the Stellar Development Foundation partnered to launch a cross-border B2B payment platform enabling Mexican businesses to send payments in pesos to the U.S. and receive dollars, leveraging Stellar's blockchain network for faster, cheaper transactions.

Tribal Credit, Bitso, and the Stellar Development Foundation launched a cross-border payment system enabling SMBs in Mexico and the U.S. to transact using USDC stablecoins, reducing costs and settlement times for international payments.

SDF CEO Denelle Dixon testified before the US House Committee on Financial Services on digital assets and blockchain's role in financial innovation, highlighting Stellar's use cases in cross-border payments, remittances, and stablecoin issuance while addressing regulatory frameworks and environmental sustainability.

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.

Benkiko, a micropayment protocol building on Stellar, is evolving to a decentralized autonomous organization. Its core innovation is a six-tier tokenization economy where communities create and trade custom tokens representing any item of economic value. The model draws from economic theory around monetary demand and peer-to-peer exchange, enabling micropayments, community economies, and full token-based systems.

Meridian 2021, Stellar's annual conference, concluded with keynotes on climate and economy, a MoneyGram partnership announcement enabling cash on/off ramps via 400k+ agent locations, ecosystem builder sessions, regulatory debates, and SDF's 2022 strategic priorities focused on utility, participation, ecosystem growth, inclusion, and policy impact.

MoneyGram and the Stellar Development Foundation launched a live pilot enabling cash deposits and international payments via Stellar USDC with near-instant settlement, marking one of the fastest blockchain integrations for a major money transfer company.

SPEEDEX is a new decentralized exchange design for Stellar that processes trades in batches, eliminating front-running, ensuring fair pricing for all users, and scaling throughput by parallelizing computation across multiple CPU cores.

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.

Flutterwave launched two new remittance corridors between Europe and Africa on Stellar, partnering with TEMPO to offer cost-effective money transfers using Stellar USDC, expanding Pan-African digital payments infrastructure.

Flutterwave launched two new remittance corridors between Europe and Africa on the Stellar network, partnering with TEMPO to enable cost-effective money transfers using Stellar USDC. The expansion aims to strengthen Pan-African digital payments infrastructure and reduce remittance costs to sub-Saharan Africa.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q3 2021 report highlighting Protocol 18 AMM upgrade preparations, a $40 million investment in Tala for digital banking, new payment corridors in Europe-Philippines and Latin America, and Canadian stablecoin VCAD launch by VersaBank and Stablecorp.

MoneyGram announced it will use Stellar blockchain to enable USDC stablecoin payments and near-real-time settlement for its customers, with rollout beginning this year and international expansion in 2022.

MoneyGram partners with Stellar Development Foundation to enable crypto payouts in local currencies using Circle's USDC stablecoin, integrating MoneyGram's network with Stellar blockchain for cross-border payments and settlement.

Arf and Tempo Payments launched a Stellar-based payment corridor from Europe to the Philippines using Circle's Stellar USDC, enabling compliant cross-border transactions with near-zero fees and instant settlement.