Stellar Ecosystem
News

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.

A comprehensive guide to building decentralized applications on Stellar's Soroban smart contract platform, covering essential developer tools, a step-by-step roadmap from setup through deployment, and community resources for support.

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.

SCF #40 concluded 2025 with 24 awarded projects receiving $2.18M in XLM funding. The round received 85 submissions and introduced governance insights on voter participation, quorum adjustments, and upcoming SCF v7.0 improvements.

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.

KALE is a proof-of-teamwork farming game on Stellar that launched in November 2024 and became a major ecosystem phenomenon, driving significant smart contract activity, stress-testing the network for Protocol 23, and serving as a foundational project for composability experiments at HackMeridian 2025.

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.

Stellar has released Protocol 25 (X-Ray) with a comprehensive upgrade guide for developers and infrastructure operators. The guide covers key dates, preparation steps, SDK updates, and breaking changes, with the mainnet upgrade scheduled for January 22, 2026.

The article details the design philosophy behind Cyberbrawl, a blockchain game built on Stellar, emphasizing that fun and core game loops should not depend on blockchain finality. The author argues for prototyping simple loops first, targeting casual-midcore players, and using blockchain solely as a continuity layer for ownership and persistence. Stellar's speed and efficiency enable this seamless integration without disrupting gameplay.

Drips launches Wave, a recurring monthly bounty cycle for open-source development. The first full program runs for Stellar starting January 2026, designed to attract developers, maintain projects, and grow communities.

Stellar Core v24.1.0 addresses a state archival issue that caused some Stellar Events to be omitted from ledger metadata between Protocol 23 and 24. Infrastructure operators running Galexie, Horizon, or RPC need to take specific remediation steps to ensure complete historical data, while consumers of Stellar Events should audit affected ledger keys.

The Stellar Development Foundation disclosed a bug in Soroban Live State Prioritization (introduced in Protocol 23) that corrupted 478 data entries starting September 4, 2025. The issue was in the eviction mechanism that moved outdated versions of persistent entries to hot-archive storage instead of the latest versions, affecting network data consistency.