Stellar Ecosystem
News

The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #36 round received 53 submissions and awarded $2,088,654 worth of XLM to 23 innovative projects. Funded initiatives span stablecoin payments, DeFi infrastructure, cross-border remittances, compliance tools, and Soroban smart contract enhancements. Highlights include Stables, Splyce Finance, and Uniblock, showcasing the ecosystem's growing sophistication.

@StellarOrg and @Giveth launched a $50,000 matching grant program using Quadratic Funding to support community-led Stellar educational events worldwide. The initiative aims to identify new community leaders and ambassadors while fostering global adoption through workshops, hackathons, and localized content.

Pacto is a non-custodial, decentralized peer-to-peer exchange for Stellar-based stablecoins, built in 48 hours at the Casa Builder Hackathon using Trustless Work. It enables merchants and users to trade stablecoins for local fiat via on-chain smart escrow contracts without intermediaries. The open-source project supports community ramps, merchant off-ramps, and DAO payouts.

A developer shares her firsthand experience winning a track at Casa Builder México 2025 hackathon, building a Stellar/Soroban smart contract project with a mixed Web2/Web3 team despite having no prior Rust or Stellar experience. She details the technical stack, timeline, challenges, and key lessons learned about participating in hackathons.

Balanced protocol is transitioning post-merger with ICON into SODAX on Sonic, with PARROT9 taking over the app. They've added Stellar support for intent-based trades, fixed bugs, and supported Stellar campaigns. Q3 plans include money market demos, full intent trades, and shipping Balanced v2.

This article provides a deep technical exploration of Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA), the consensus mechanism used by Stellar and Ripple, contrasting it with Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. It examines FBA's architecture, the philosophical differences between Stellar's bottom-up approach and Ripple's managed model, discusses inherent risks like bootstrapping trust and quorum centralization, and explores emerging applications beyond cryptocurrency.

Trustless Work participated in Casa Builders CDMX, a Stellar-hosted hackathon in Mexico focusing on financial inclusion, digital identity, and public good transparency. Their team built Pacto, a decentralized P2P stablecoin ramp using Trustless Work's programmable escrow, and won the event. The hackathon united Latin American builders, with strong Costa Rican representation.

XLM surged 6% to $0.3880 on Saturday, becoming the top performer among top 20 cryptocurrencies. The rally follows PayPal's announcement of launching its PYUSD stablecoin on Stellar, with executives highlighting the network's speed, low costs, and global reach across 170+ countries.

Arf uses USDC on Stellar to provide short-term working capital loans to licensed money service providers, enabling real-time settlement without requiring prefunding.

Yugo Cabrio and Changmin Cho completed Milestone #1 of the UltraHonk Verifier for Soroban project, delivering a pure Rust implementation of the UltraHonk proof verifier that enables Noir/Barretenberg proofs to be verified on Stellar Soroban. After discovering incompatibility with the Taceo-labs extraction approach, they implemented the verifier from scratch in Rust with full CI/CD integration.

GearUp, a Stellar-based marketplace for creative professionals, has attracted over 500 signups and 140+ equipment listings in less than three months on mainnet. The platform enables creators to rent gear, purchase equipment, access courses, and book studio spaces in a unified ecosystem.