Stellar Ecosystem
News

A Stellar Development Foundation Senior Marketing Advisor shares their first-month experience joining @StellarOrg to lead APAC strategy. They highlight Stellar's focus on real-world financial problems, the recent Soroban smart contract upgrade enabling complex dApps, and opportunities for founders and developers to build on the ecosystem.

The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its comprehensive strategy for implementing privacy on the Stellar blockchain while maintaining openness and compliance. The approach combines opt-in, configurable privacy at the application layer with three key work streams: supporting research and innovation, investing in core privacy infrastructure like zero-knowledge proofs, and building open-source solutions including confidential tokens.

The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #38 round received 83 submissions and awarded $2,568,750 worth of XLM to 24 innovative projects. Funded initiatives span DeFi platforms, wallets, payment solutions, real-world applications like food delivery and remittances, and developer tools for the Stellar ecosystem. This round highlights the rapid evolution and community commitment to building practical utility on Stellar.

Range's Stablecoin Explorer provides a unified view of stablecoin transactions across 100+ chains including Stellar, and 21 bridges, solving cross-chain visibility issues for wallets, dApps, and bridges. It offers one-step integration with full transaction lifecycle tracking, entity enrichment, and blacklist integration. Teams can link users to a single explorer for improved UX without engineering overhead.

Stellar completed a mainnet vote to launch Protocol 23, introducing eight Core Advancement Protocols that enable parallel smart contract execution, faster transaction processing, and improved scalability. The upgrade comes as Stellar's DeFi ecosystem surges with institutional adoption, including Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund and Circle's USDC.

Certora organized the first formal verification contests for Rust-based Soroban smart contracts on Stellar, partnering with Code4rena and Cantina. The contests for Blend v2 and Aquarius protocols featured a 40,000 USDC prize pool and used mutation testing to evaluate specifications. They demonstrated the effectiveness of Certora's Sunbeam prover in securing DeFi protocols on Stellar.

21X, Europe's first fully regulated DLT trading and settlement system, has launched on the Stellar network as its second blockchain, enabling institutional trading of tokenized securities on a regulated secondary market in the EU.

EquitX introduces synthetic stocks (xAssets) on the Stellar blockchain, enabling users to gain exposure to real-world equities like Tesla without owning actual shares. The platform supports long, short, swing, and passive investment strategies through minting, trading on DEXs, and stability pools. It emphasizes maintaining collateral ratios above 110% to avoid liquidation while offering DeFi accessibility.

Blockchain benefits both financial institutions seeking efficiency and the 1.4 billion unbanked needing accessibility, as emphasized by Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon. Institutional adoption by firms like Franklin Templeton and BlackRock validates infrastructure that also enables fast, low-cost remittances and humanitarian aid. Success requires intentional design serving both ends of the financial spectrum.

EquitX has received two awards totaling $150,000 from the Stellar Community Fund to develop its Synthetic Stocks Protocol on the Stellar blockchain. The protocol enables synthetic small-cap equities like xUSD and xTesla using collateralized debt positions backed by XLM. This bridges traditional markets with DeFi, leveraging Stellar's low-cost blockspace, DEXs, and Soroban smart contracts.

Stellar Development Foundation details major upgrades to Stellar Core aimed at achieving 5000 TPS and reducing block time to 2.5 seconds. The improvements parallelize transaction dissemination, consensus voting, and block execution across separate threads, with v22.1.0 already deployed and showing significant main thread pressure reduction.