DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Bitget Wallet launches PayFi Odyssey, a multi-phase rewards campaign offering $300,000 XLM to users for everyday crypto payments. The campaign includes a $200,000 Odyssey Program for card activation and onchain activity, and a $100,000 QR Pay campaign across APAC and LATAM regions.
Drips Network launches Wave 5 on May 26th with per-organization points caps (75k per cycle), upfront identity verification to eliminate payout delays, refined AI-based appeals for contribution disputes, and strengthened backend systems. The focus shifts toward fairness and operational health.
Kraken now supports USDC deposits and withdrawals on Stellar. USDC on Stellar is natively issued by Circle, offering a fully reserved digital dollar on a network built for fast, low-cost payments.
Stellar Development Foundation announces new Market Development leadership across six regions: Latin America, Brazil, Europe, Africa, Middle East, and APAC. The team will focus on converting Stellar's existing footprint into institutional adoption through region-specific knowledge and on-the-ground presence.
Drips launched Wave, a grants program for open source developers on Stellar, completing three cycles with thousands of contributors. The team also partnered with UNICEF to explore sustainable funding for digital public goods and updated their protocol to use Lit Protocol for faster GitHub repository verification.
Stellar's leader reflects on seven years building for institutional adoption rather than disruption, highlighting how early architectural choices around compliance, asset controls, and regulatory engagement positioned the network to win as traditional finance moves onchain.
Ascend and the Stellar Development Foundation announced a strategic partnership with $1 million in investment to build compliance-first credit infrastructure for regulated real-world assets on Stellar, combining Ascend's ERC-3643 standard with Stellar's institutional settlement capabilities.
Stellar Development Foundation invests in Cashlink, a regulated European platform for token-based securities issuance and settlement. Cashlink serves as an independent infrastructure layer for capital markets, with clients including Deutsche Bank and KfW. The company has processed EUR 850+ million in transaction volume across 300+ live issuances.
MoneyGram and Stellar extend their partnership to expand stablecoin-backed remittance services from Colombia to El Salvador, enabling families to receive and hold USDC instantly at MoneyGram locations across Latin America.
Alchemy now supports Stellar with full infrastructure including RPC, indexing, and developer tools. The announcement highlights Stellar's unique features: sub-5-second finality, Soroban smart contracts in Rust/WebAssembly, native institutional financial integrations, and active ecosystem building across payments, DeFi, RWAs, and neobanking.
Balanced v2 launched with a cross-network money market and exchange across 12 networks powered by SODAX infrastructure. Users can supply crypto on one network and borrow on another with unified liquidity and free cross-network transfers for compatible assets.
Amundi and Spiko launched SAFO, a tokenized overnight swap fund with shareholder registers on Ethereum and Stellar, using Chainlink oracles for NAV data. The dual-chain structure leverages Stellar's low-cost transfers alongside Ethereum's smart contract ecosystem.
A financial institution executive argues that blockchain adoption faces a critical barrier: the tension between transparency (blockchain's core value) and institutional privacy needs around competitive intelligence. The article explores how cryptographic privacy solutions at the application layer could preserve blockchain's integrity while protecting sensitive business data.
CME Group launched Stellar futures in February alongside Cardano and Chainlink, now providing access to over 75% of crypto market cap. The exchange reported $25 billion average daily open interest in its crypto suite during 2025.
Stellar research report examines the network's evolution into institutional financial infrastructure. Reports $246M in stablecoins spanning 9+ currencies, $1.4B in tokenized RWAs from regulated issuers like Franklin Templeton and Spiko, and 52.8M smart contract invocations in February alone, demonstrating operational scale for settlement and asset issuance.
Axelar Network has integrated Stellar, enabling cross-chain access and liquidity. Solv, Stronghold, and Squid are already live, allowing users to bridge assets like solvBTC and SHx across chains while maintaining Stellar's efficiency and compliance infrastructure.
Stellar processed 3.6 billion transactions in 2025 with 99.99% uptime, reaching 10.3 million unique addresses and $785 million in onchain real-world assets. Major institutions including Franklin Templeton, U.S. Bank, PayPal, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands deployed production systems on Stellar, while payment volume hit $55.6 billion, up 52% year-over-year.
IRL, a cultural loyalty platform, successfully onboarded 73,000+ people into the Stellar ecosystem through real-world activations at Meridian 2025 in Rio de Janeiro and Art Basel's Stellar House in Miami, using Privy wallets and IRL Touchpoints to create seamless onchain experiences without requiring crypto knowledge.
Stellar Light, the ecosystem directory and analytics platform, has launched major updates including a unified Stablecoin Explorer tracking 22+ verified stablecoins, a searchable directory of 230+ Stellar projects, and an Ideas & RFP platform for builders. The platform is now positioned as shared infrastructure connecting projects, users, and institutions across the Stellar ecosystem.
Rubic announces multiple integrations including Sui going live, MegaETH Day 1 support, and an expanded Stellar integration funded by the Stellar Community Fund. The Stellar update enables cross-chain swaps via providers like SimpleSwap and Changelly, with support for LOBSTR and Freighter wallets. Additional enhancements include expanded Relay support and a upcoming Rubic × Stellar marketing campaign.
An essay arguing that blockchain protocols and traditional payment systems will coexist and complement each other rather than compete. The author, from the Stellar Development Foundation, advocates for building bridges between code-based coordination (open protocols) and committee-based coordination (legacy financial rails) to serve different use cases and global financial needs.
At Davos 2026, Arf, LuLu Financial Holdings, and the Stellar Development Foundation presented PayFi as a production payments layer. Moving beyond pilots, the framework integrates programmable liquidity, embedded compliance, and autonomous settlement directly into transaction execution. The panel demonstrated how this enables live cross-border payment flows without prefunding or manual orchestration on Stellar infrastructure.
Etherfuse has partnered with Shinhan Securities to expand tokenized sovereign debt in Korea and Asia, leveraging high-performance blockchains including Stellar. The collaboration aims to provide institutional access to onchain government bonds with preserved economic structures and regulatory alignment. This reflects growing interest in blockchain for enhancing efficiency in traditional capital markets.
At Stellar House Miami, the Stellar Development Foundation hosted a panel discussion featuring Crossmint, Airtm, and MoneyGram on revolutionizing cross-border payments. The panelists highlighted how blockchain infrastructure enables instant settlement, faster than traditional finance, and discussed the key ingredients for building trust in financial systems: speed, predictability, and security.
Drips closed Q4 2025 strong with regional expansion across Asia, launched end-to-end RetroPGF with Filecoin, and introduced new protocol features including ORCID and website funding support. The team also announced Drips Wave, recurring bounty cycles launching with the Stellar Development Foundation in January 2026.
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.
GrantFox has received a Stellar Community Fund Build Award, marking a key milestone for open-source collaboration in the Stellar ecosystem. It steps in to fill the gap left by OnlyDust's exit, offering improved discovery, coordination, and trustless payouts via Trustless Work. The award enables GrantFox to scale as Stellar's open-source collaboration platform.
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.
BP Ventures' StellarMesh Anchor project has won a Stellar Community Fund #40 Build Award, recognizing its role in connecting global exchange liquidity to Stellar's onchain rails. The infrastructure enables instant, compliant funding for Stellar wallets via SEP-24/31 standards. This milestone validates the project's contribution to interoperability and real-world asset movement on Stellar.
