DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
TokenOps leverages Stellar's Soroban smart contracts for scalable, low-cost token operations including airdrops, vesting, and TGEs. It offers 3-5 second settlement times, fixed fees, and real-time tracking with backend persistence. This enables efficient automation, transparency, and compliance for Web3 projects on Stellar.
Veridise has published a security checklist for Soroban developers to prepare for smart contract audits. The guide covers best practices and vulnerability prevention for building on Stellar's native smart contract platform.
Meridian 2025, the Stellar Development Foundation's flagship conference held in Rio de Janeiro, showcased major advancements in the Stellar ecosystem under the theme 'The Blueprint.' Key highlights included Soroban smart contract launches, over $3 billion in RWA tokenizations, PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin integration, and new partnerships. The event solidified Stellar's leadership in real-world financial applications and announced Meridian 2026 in Abu Dhabi.
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.
Guide to integration testing best practices for Soroban smart contracts, covering realistic local network setup, end-to-end user flows, state validation, edge case testing, and CI automation with practical examples.
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.
Hoops Finance's CTO Tim Baker details their indexer upgrades on Stellar for Protocol 23 support, resumable ingestion, and historical contract specs. They store raw transaction data before parsing, resume from exact pages to avoid re-ingestion, and maintain historical WASM bytecode to correctly parse upgraded contracts. This ensures precise, durable data across Postgres, MongoDB, and Neo4j for market analytics and dashboards.
A comprehensive tutorial on building a Stellar smart contract that uses Reflector oracle to create a EUR price prediction market. The guide covers contract initialization, oracle integration, storage patterns, token transfers, and verification logic using Soroban.
SDF plans to scale Stellar Core to 5000 TPS in 2025 through Protocol 23, parallel execution, decoupled consensus, aggressive caching, and improved benchmarking. These upgrades enable Soroban to handle higher transaction volumes without requiring node operators to upgrade hardware.
A developer shares her firsthand experience winning a track at Casa Builder México 2025 hackathon, building a Stellar/Soroban smart contract project with a mixed Web2/Web3 team despite having no prior Rust or Stellar experience. She details the technical stack, timeline, challenges, and key lessons learned about participating in hackathons.
The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 scalability roadmap to increase Stellar Core's theoretical throughput to 5000 TPS through five key initiatives: Protocol 23 with multi-threaded smart contract execution, increased parallelism in Core, decoupling consensus from execution, aggressive caching for state loads, and improved benchmarking frameworks.
Yugo Cabrio and Changmin Cho completed Milestone #1 of the UltraHonk Verifier for Soroban project, delivering a pure Rust implementation of the UltraHonk proof verifier that enables Noir/Barretenberg proofs to be verified on Stellar Soroban. After discovering incompatibility with the Taceo-labs extraction approach, they implemented the verifier from scratch in Rust with full CI/CD integration.
Trustless Work is participating in OnlyDust OS Wave #1 from June 26 to July 6, offering high-impact tasks for contributors preparing for mainnet launch. Tasks include escrow viewer refactors, wallet analytics, smart contract optimizations, passkey integration, and backoffice enhancements on the Stellar blockchain. Contributors can join via OnlyDust to work on real smart contracts, UI features, and dev tools for the stablecoin economy.
Tansu introduces anonymous voting for proposals on Soroban using zero-knowledge proofs and the BLS12-381 elliptic curve. The system employs Pedersen commitments to store encrypted votes on-chain, ensuring privacy while allowing verifiable tallies via homomorphic properties. Detailed smart contract interfaces and CLI commands are provided for setup, voting, and execution.
Protocol 23 introduces eight Core Advancement Proposals (CAPs) to the Stellar network, featuring major performance improvements for Soroban including reduced costs, parallel transaction execution, and automatic state restoration. The mainnet vote is scheduled for September 3, 2025.
Stellar is advancing its blockchain with a public roadmap emphasizing scalability, usability, and developer tools like Soroban optimizations, Freighter wallet, AI assistants Stella and Contract Copilot, and integrations with OpenZeppelin. It powers real-world assets with $522 million on-chain and $17 billion in volume across 70 countries. The ecosystem offers robust support via the Stellar Community Fund and production-ready infrastructure.
The Stellar Q2 testnet will reset on June 18 at 17:00 UTC, wiping all contracts, assets, accounts, and data. Simultaneously, Trustless Work v2.0 will launch on the main branch with major upgrades including multi-release escrows, API changes, and new escrow logic. Developers should prepare for breaking changes with upcoming guides and documentation.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced enhanced 2025 updates to the Soroban Security Audit Bank, which has conducted over 40 audits and deployed $3 million in support. The program now offers complimentary initial audits with co-payment refunds for swift vulnerability remediation, incentivized follow-up audits at TVL milestones, advanced security tooling, and enhanced audit readiness support.
Soroban introduces smart contracts to the Stellar blockchain, leveraging WebAssembly and Rust for secure, efficient execution. Integrated natively into Stellar, it enables DeFi, tokenization, DAOs, and more without compromising speed or low costs. Launched on mainnet in 2023, it positions Stellar as a full-fledged dApp ecosystem.
This article introduces Stellar DeFi, highlighting its strengths in interoperability, scalability, and low-cost transactions. It covers key features like the Stellar Consensus Protocol, Soroban smart contracts, asset tokenization, and applications in cross-border payments and financial inclusion. Stellar is positioned as a leader in building scalable DeFi solutions for both retail and institutional users.
Stellar introduces Soroban, its WebAssembly-based smart contract platform built in Rust, enabling developers to create DeFi applications, tokenized assets, DAOs, and other decentralized applications while maintaining low costs and high security on the Stellar network.
OpenZeppelin's Contract Wizard now supports Stellar's Soroban smart contracts platform, enabling developers to easily generate secure SEP-41 fungible tokens. This tutorial walks through using the wizard and Stellar CLI to create and deploy tokens on the Stellar testnet.
Estrela, a Soroban-based DEX on Stellar, has completed its second security audit by Quarkslab, focusing on its 3-pool smart contracts. No critical issues were found, confirming a strong security foundation ahead of launch. This builds on Quarkslab's prior audits of Estrela and Allbridge Core.
OpenZeppelin's security audit of the Stellar Contracts Library, a new set of smart contract components for Soroban, identified one high-severity issue, one medium-severity issue, and five low-severity issues across fungible token and pausable utility modules. All issues have been resolved through pull requests.
PaltaLabs won the Best Oracle-Based Smart Contract Award at the 2nd Reflector Dev Contest for Trustless Portfolio Manager, an automated DeFi portfolio rebalancing tool built on Soroban that combines Reflector price feeds, DeFindex vaults, and Soroswap AMM functionality.
A comprehensive guide to testing smart contracts on Stellar using Soroban, covering unit tests, integration tests, fork tests, fuzzing, differential testing, and code coverage strategies all built into the Rust SDK.
The Stellar Community Fund returns for its sixth iteration with a focus on Soroban smart contracts, introducing new focal points including the Kickstart bootcamp, SCF Build Awards (up to $150,000 in XLM grants), and delegate panels for expert mentorship.