Stellar Ecosystem
News

A comprehensive technical exploration of privacy-preserving trading mechanisms on Stellar, comparing zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and trusted execution environments. The authors built working prototypes using MPC and TEE approaches, with TEEs emerging as the most practical solution for production systems.

Drips is launching Stellar Wave 2 on February 19th with major improvements including application quotas, post-contribution surveys, language filtering, org profiles, Discord linking, and enhanced spam protection.

Stellar Dev Skill is a new open-source tool that integrates with AI coding agents (Claude, OpenCode, Codex) to provide up-to-date Stellar development guidance, covering Soroban contracts, SDKs, APIs, wallets, security, and DeFi ecosystem resources.

A technical tutorial demonstrating how to verify RISC Zero zero-knowledge proofs within Stellar smart contracts using Soroban, enabling complex off-chain computations to be verified on-chain.

A developer guide comparing three zero-knowledge proof frameworks for the zkGaming on Stellar hackathon: RISC Zero, Noir, and Circom. Each framework offers different trade-offs in expressiveness, ease of use, and on-chain verification complexity.

This article explains the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) and its innovative use of quorum slices and Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) to achieve decentralized consensus. It details how SCP enables Stellar to operate with high security, low costs, and high performance while promoting organic network growth through open participation.

A retrospective on Stellar's 2025 hackathon ecosystem, highlighting how events evolved from weekend competitions into community-driven onboarding infrastructure. The article details 64 IRL events, 8,820 developer participants globally, and a shift toward long-term builder retention through mentorship and composability-focused hackathons.

Stellar Protocol 25 X-Ray, voting tomorrow, introduces native zero-knowledge proof verification capabilities to Stellar smart contracts, including support for BN254 elliptic curves, Poseidon hashing, and Noir circuit verification.

This article provides a comprehensive Spanish-language guide to Stellar Community Fund (SCF) 7.0, explaining its funding process, key changes, and application steps for builders in the Stellar ecosystem. It covers the Interest Form entry point, three Build tracks (Open, Integration, RFP), tranche-based funding up to $150K-$300K in XLM, and practical tips for maximizing success. SCF emphasizes real products, execution, and community governance over mere ideas.

The Stellar Development Foundation has launched SCF v7.0, a major upgrade to the Stellar Community Fund grant program featuring three new build award tracks (Integrate, Open, RFP), improved submission pathways with referral incentives, milestone-based funding tied to execution, ambassador-led Instawards for early-stage projects, and post-launch growth pathways for successful teams.

An article discussing the importance of financial privacy in blockchain systems and how Stellar's upcoming Protocol X-Ray upgrade will enable zero-knowledge proof verification in Soroban smart contracts, allowing developers to build privacy-preserving applications while maintaining blockchain transparency.

Inference, a formal verification framework, analyzes three WebAssembly-based blockchain platforms—Polkadot Substrate, Stellar Soroban, and Arbitrum Stylus—evaluating their architectural suitability for formal verification of smart contracts and core infrastructure.

Stellar hackathons are driving innovation by fostering collaborative development of decentralized apps on the Stellar blockchain and Soroban smart contracts. Key initiatives like the Build Better Contest and partnerships with UNDP's SDG Blockchain Accelerator turn ideas into real-world impact projects. These events build a thriving developer community through learning, networking, and funding opportunities.

The Stellar Development Foundation published a comprehensive 2025 year-in-review highlighting major ecosystem growth: RWAs grew 172%, TVL reached $211M+ (up 95%), and the network processed 21.5B+ operations across 10M+ active accounts. Key institutional milestones included PayPal USD going live on Stellar, Franklin Templeton expanding tokenized Treasuries to European investors, and the Marshall Islands completing the world's first onchain UBI disbursement.

Trustless Work reviews its 2025 achievements, including completion of the Draper University/Stellar Embark program, extensive hackathon participation across chains like Stellar and Solana, and shipping production-ready escrow infrastructure. The project highlights builder adoption, enterprise pilots in real estate tokenization and private credit, and Stellar's ecosystem growth with milestones like PYUSD launch. Looking to 2026, they aim to accelerate integrations, volume, and tokenized assets while preparing to raise capital.

Rise In's November 2025 monthly update highlights record-breaking HackStellar Istanbul with 52 projects, over 250 new projects from India events, and expansion into Vietnam. Top winning projects include Stellar x402 for HTTP micro-payments, Reset DeFi yield aggregator, and Sublayer subscription manager. Globally, over 300 projects and 1,300 builders are driving Stellar ecosystem growth.

This article explores composability on Stellar, demonstrating how modular DeFi protocols can be combined to create seamless user experiences. It details a real-world example of Blend, DeFindex, and Beans working together as execution, abstraction, and user-facing layers, and encourages developers to build on Stellar's growing ecosystem.

Drips announced Wave, a new contribution cycle platform launching with Stellar Development Foundation in January 2026. Wave creates structured, short-term funding opportunities for open-source developers while reducing operational overhead for maintainers.

Jay Malve has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer at Normal after just four months as a Full Stack Engineer. His contributions include architecting onchain index funds built on Stellar and enhancing the company's engineering culture. Jay outlines his vision for seamless crypto adoption across chains with intuitive products.

The Stellar Development Foundation is consolidating Go developer tools into a unified Go SDK, renaming the monorepo from stellar/go to stellar/go-stellar-sdk. This change aligns the Go ecosystem with other Stellar SDKs and improves discoverability by clearly separating reusable SDK components from service code.