Stellar Ecosystem
News

Merkl, the onchain distribution infrastructure used by Circle and Coinbase, powered major summer launches: Robinhood Earn (rate management), Coinbase Tokenized Stocks (cashback on Base), and 1inch Aqua (volume rewards). Merkl also expanded to three new chains—Pharos, Kaia, and Robinhood Chain—and made its Stellar debut with Templar and Upshift vaults live.

Tellus Cooperative opened a Blockchain Hub in Santiago with Stellar Development Foundation support. The hub serves as physical infrastructure for the Chilean Web3 community to collaborate and build on Stellar, underpinned by Tellus's cooperative model of horizontal decision-making and value distribution—a contrast to venture-driven startup culture.

Arcane and Predicate are building complementary infrastructure for private financial applications on Stellar. The piece explains how these platforms handle compliance before, during, and after private transactions: pre-screening participants, applying policy over time, responding when risk changes, and providing governed access to confidential evidence when investigation or disclosure is required.

SODA token is now tradeable on XLM Domains, a decentralized identity and DeFi platform on Stellar. The integration enables SODA holders to trade, manage positions, and access SODAX execution across 20+ networks from Stellar's native payment address system.

A guide to alternative ways to succeed in the Stellar ecosystem beyond founding a startup. Whether you're a developer, designer, community organizer, or infrastructure builder, the ecosystem needs your skills. Discover five paths to impact without launching a company.

Stellar was built for regulated financial activity from the start, with compliance controls at the network layer rather than retrofitted afterward. DTCC, Circle, and WisdomTree each independently chose the network for different reasons: post-trade infrastructure, stablecoin issuance, and tokenized funds, respectively. Their convergence signals institutional confidence in Stellar's architectural fitness for regulated finance at scale.

Stellar's RWA market surpasses $4 billion, driven by euro-denominated assets from Spiko, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo. Stablecoin payment volumes hit record $7.4 billion in August. New integrations include Tether USDT0 and Zebec enterprise payroll. Stellar also previewed Private Payments and released the Adapter upgrade.

Firelight Protocol raised $8 million to provide DeFi exploit protection for fintechs moving yield products on-chain. The protocol expands backing collateral from XRP to Bitcoin and Stellar's XLM, with a 10-day claims settlement model designed for institutional adoption.

Certora compared three Soroban security tools—Sunbeam (formal verifier), Komet (hybrid fuzzing/proving), and cargo-fuzz—on detecting bugs and proving correctness. Fuzzing found obvious failures quickly but missed rare edge cases. Sunbeam detected all bugs and proved correct code was mathematically sound.

At Tellus Cooperative's Builder Night, a 30-minute hackathon tested rapid shipping through clear infrastructure and social momentum. Builders claimed pizzas with a PIZZA token via Sozu wallets on Stellar, proving practical merchant integration and low barrier to entry.

On August 25, an attacker exploited a Comet smart contract bug that failed to verify token inputs in swap functions, extracting 717,518 USDC from the BLND-USDC liquidity pool. Community white hats quickly recovered 190k USDC and 23M BLND before copycat attacks. Script3 is leading recovery and remediation efforts; Blend protocol lending continues but backstop deposits are at risk due to the non-upgradeable LP token.

WisdomTree brings diversified tokenized portfolios to Stellar with 15 SEC-registered funds spanning equities, fixed income, and alternatives. As RWAs hit $3.5B across 70 assets on the network, the market is maturing beyond one-off T-bills into real multi-asset portfolios.

Stellar's São Paulo Builder Summit brought 218 developers from 10+ countries together for eight days of focused work across three lanes: privacy, payment ramps, and agentic tooling. The event produced 19 completed projects and 50+ bounty submissions.