DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Sorobanathon: First Light, the inaugural program of the $100M Soroban Adoption Fund, concluded December 15th with 59 technical submissions from 27 developers and 93,600 XLM distributed. Highlights include smart contracts for DAOs, lotteries, Dutch auctions, and developer tools, plus NFT art contributions for Stellar Quest Live Series 5.
Stellar Quest Live Series 5 concluded after a year-long hiatus, attracting 2,344 unique accounts and distributing over 1 million XLM across six Soroban-focused challenges. The series was the most successful to date, driving 50+ submissions to Sorobanathon: First Light despite technical challenges and XLM farming issues.
Synced's December 2022 development log outlines aims to release dashboards on their dev web app, learn Rust and Soroban, and test a simple DAO contract. Progress includes merging dashboards into the main product and gaining comfort with Rust, noting Soroban's simplicity. The log is signed by Tejas.
Stellar Quest Live Series 5 celebrates community resilience through memorable bugs and breakthroughs. From crashed anchors to Futurenet peer limits, the Lumenaut volunteer team has repeatedly turned infrastructure failures into network improvements while maintaining humor and camaraderie.
The Stellar Newsletter highlights recent ecosystem developments including Soroban smart contracts live on Futurenet with a $100M developer fund and Sorobanathon. It covers Meridian 2022 on-demand sessions, Stellar Quest Live Series 5, bridge bounty grants, and the new Anchor Platform. Additional updates include stablecoin launches, SDF investments in NetXD and Wave, and community fund discussions.
Stellar Quest Live Series 5 returns after a year hiatus, featuring six Soroban smart contract challenges running November 10 through December 1. Developers compete in real-time quests to earn NFT badges and share 534k XLM in rewards.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q3 2022 report highlighting major progress: Soroban smart contracts launched on futurenet, a $100M adoption fund was announced, Meridian 2022 conference drew 380+ attendees, and the Anchor Platform entered final testing.
Soroban, Stellar's smart contracts platform, is now live on Futurenet. The SDF launched Sorobanathon: First Light, the first program under its $100M Soroban Adoption Fund, offering developers 250-3,000 XLM rewards for creating tutorials, code examples, and documentation.
Stellar Development Foundation announced Soroban, its native smart contracts platform, is now live on Futurenet testnet, alongside a $100M adoption fund to support developers building on the platform.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced a $100M Soroban Adoption Fund to support developers building on Soroban, its native smart contracts platform now live on Futurenet. The fund includes Sorobanathon: First Light, an incentive program rewarding developers for testing and providing feedback.
Soroban, Stellar's native smart contract platform, launched on Futurenet with a $100 million Adoption Fund from the Stellar Development Foundation. The platform emphasizes lower gas fees and consistent pricing through optimized contract design and a calibrated fee model.
Synced's development log details progress on new dashboards and bounty features, with ongoing experimentation with Stellar Soroban smart contracts. Key activities include merging dashboards into core, preparing for a Shenzhen innovation competition, and attending the Stellar Meridian conference. The log spans from early October to mid-November 2022.
Litemint has launched decentralized NFT auctions on the Stellar blockchain, utilizing time-bound transactions, pre-authorized transactions, and path payments for secure, trustless execution. The system ensures no third-party custody, bid protection until auction end, reserve price enforcement, and participant withdrawal rights. Full settlement occurs on the Stellar DEX via a pre-authorized contract transaction.
Stellar Development Foundation released the second preview of Soroban, its smart contracts platform, featuring built-in contracts, expanded metering, a new Auth SDK, and significant SDK/CLI improvements including new commands for local development and contract inspection.
The Stellar Development Foundation unveiled Soroban, a new smart contracts platform built on WebAssembly and Rust. The preview release lets developers write and test contracts locally, marking the SDF's first early-stage public preview and inviting community feedback.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q2 2022 report highlighting progress on three strategic pillars: Protocol 19 went live enabling payment channels, Project Jump Cannon smart contracts advanced with WASM, and ecosystem funding reached 10.5M XLM across 15 projects through the Stellar Community Fund's 10th round.
Deep dive into Stellar's native multi-signature feature, exploring how m-of-n multisig enables advanced use cases like multi-party consensus, pre-authorized transactions, commitment schemes, and proof-of-work incentives without smart contracts.
Stellar Development Foundation CEO reflects on three years of leadership, highlighting past achievements like bringing USDC to Stellar and the MoneyGram partnership, present momentum with ecosystem products launching, and future priorities including smart contracts via Project Jump Cannon, bridging, and scalability.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q1 2022 report highlighting major initiatives: Project Jump Cannon for native smart contracts, Starbridge for Ethereum interoperability, $1.5M in Matching Fund investments, and continued USDC adoption across exchanges.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced Project Jump Cannon will use WebAssembly (WASM) as its smart contract runtime. After evaluating EVM, Move, eBPF, and other options, the SDF chose WASM for its robust execution environment, thriving ecosystem, and alignment with Stellar's values of safety, scalability, and equitable access.
Stellar Development Foundation announces Project Jump Cannon, a research initiative to bring native smart contracts to Stellar. SDF explains why the network initially avoided smart contracts and why ecosystem growth now demands this capability while maintaining Stellar's core values of safety, scalability, and equitable access.
The Script3 team announces that YieldBlox Protocol will delay its mainnet launch on Stellar Turrets and instead wait for Stellar's on-chain smart contracts due to superior security, community focus, and feasibility concerns. They detail the decision process following SDF's roadmap announcement and unsuccessful grant proposal. The project remains committed to launching securely with the YBX token once smart contracts are ready.
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.
YieldBlox introduces Protocol Owned Debt to eliminate liquidation cascade risks by having lending pools borrow from themselves and settle via fees, enhancing stability and capital efficiency on Stellar. It also upgrades to Growing Liability Tokens for better interest tracking and ~30% performance gains. Launch delayed by a month, with community calls planned for December.
YieldBlox announces updates to its YBX airdrop due to bot activity, introducing day-zero staking with a 10x multiplier for genuine users and staggering payouts over six weeks. The testnet beta saw over 472,000 YBX farmed, revealing key insights into user strategies and protocol improvements on Stellar. Upcoming changes include UX enhancements, smart contract fixes, and mainnet launch by late November.
Project Venus is a DeFi protocol on Stellar using Turing Signing Servers (TSS) to enable trustless smart contracts without an on-chain VM. It implements short-term FX forwards to improve capital efficiency for Stellar-based financial institutions like remittance companies. TSS leverages off-chain servers (turrets) combined with Stellar's multi-sig for efficient DeFi.
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.
Mobius Network raised $35 million in a token presale on Stellar, exceeding its $25 million goal. The smart contract platform plans to facilitate machine-to-machine micropayments and will launch its full ICO on January 18, 2018.
Stellar Development Foundation released an upgraded distributed network codebase with improved security, scalability, and modularity. The new version introduces batching operations and multisignature accounts, enabling developers to build financial services like crowdfunding without scripting.
