Stellar Ecosystem
News

A deep dive into Blend, Stellar's largest DeFi protocol, examining how its permissionless pool creation, market-funded backstop insurance, and mechanism design solve the governance bottleneck in lending protocols while maintaining safety through isolation and aligned incentives.

Hana Earn allows users to passively earn yield on USDC while maintaining full liquidity and control within the Hana crypto app. It eliminates DeFi complexities like monitoring, locking funds, or switching apps by leveraging an onchain stack including Stellar for fast, low-cost settlements. Users can spend or swap USDC anytime without interrupting earnings.

Token Terminal's weekly Snapshot covers emerging DeFi vault curators, Paxos' growth to $6.7B in issued assets including PYUSD and USDG, Solana's diversifying stablecoin landscape, and Ethereum L1's record transactions at low fees. It highlights new listings like Fathom on XDC and tokenized assets on Stellar such as sgBENJI and gBENJI. Platform updates include Studio improvements and a new Nansen integration.

Certora's 2025 report highlights their expansion as a leading DeFi security partner, securing 70% of top protocols by TVL including Stellar, Aave, and Compound. They reviewed hundreds of thousands of lines of code across chains like EVM, Solana, and Stellar, preventing 720+ vulnerabilities and protecting $196.5B in assets. Formal verification proved key invariants for protocols like Stellar, ensuring long-term solvency and security.

Stellar's financial ecosystem expanded significantly in 2025, with stablecoin market cap growing 53% to $243.6M driven by PayPal's PYUSD launch, while RWA market cap surged 196% to $890.2M. U.S. Bank is testing custom stablecoin issuance on Stellar, and the Marshall Islands completed the world's first onchain universal basic income disbursement by a national government.

Hana launches Hana Earn, a seamless feature allowing users to earn yield on USDC directly within the Hana app without lockups or added complexity. Funds remain spendable and under user control, powered by infrastructure including Stellar for fast, low-cost settlements. This makes crypto function more like traditional money by integrating earning into everyday holding and spending.

This article reviews top DeFi portfolio trackers for 2026, including CoinLedger, DeBank, Zapper, Plena Finance, and Bitwave, emphasizing their role in managing complex DeFi assets across chains. It highlights essential features like multi-chain support, real-time data, and tax integration. The piece promotes Hoops Finance AI Copilot for Stellar ecosystem insights.

HOT Wallet by HOT Labs is presented as the premier wallet for Stellar (XLM) users, offering intuitive swaps, bridging, staking, and free account activation on the Stellar network. It supports XLM, USDC, EURC, and other assets across mobile, browser, and Telegram platforms. The article details setup, swapping via Aquarius and Soroswap, bridging, and unique features like MPC security and 24/7 support.

Trustless Work introduces escrow-native trade flows for B2B platforms and marketplaces, enabling secure cross-border transactions using stablecoins on Stellar. The platform replaces traditional letters of credit and prepayment risks with smart contract-enforced escrow that holds buyer funds until delivery verification.

Normal's 2025 recap highlights its evolution from a centralized product to a fully self-custodial, decentralized protocol built on Stellar. Key achievements include 30,000 lines of smart contract code for wallets, AMMs, DEX, synthetic assets, and on-chain indexes, a Halborn security audit backed by SDF, and a Stellar Community Fund grant. The team expanded with key hires like CTO Jay and frontend lead Niko, while hosting global community events.

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.

Allbridge launches a multi-wave on-chain campaign to introduce users to the Stellar ecosystem through practical quests and rewards. The campaign features a $10,000 reward pool across five two-week waves, starting December 22, focusing on bridging assets and interacting with Stellar protocols. Supported by the Stellar Development Foundation, it emphasizes DeFi, asset issuance, and real-world adoption.

LumosCore announces a 50 million LUMOS liquidity provider incentive program over 25 months across Stellar and XRPL, distributing 2 million tokens monthly to support deeper liquidity and tighter spreads ahead of multi-chain infrastructure updates.

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.

Stellar Meridian 2025 in Rio showcased the evolution of Stellar's blockchain into production-grade infrastructure for payments, identity, RWAs, and stablecoins. Key sessions highlighted open systems, regulatory progress, privacy innovations, and real-world applications from partners like MoneyGram, Nubank, and Ondo Finance. LATAM and Africa emerged as blueprints for financial inclusion and efficient money movement.

Beans integrated DeFindex to launch stablecoin yield features in 3 weeks, attracting $610K in deposits within 90 days. The partnership eliminated 11+ months of development work by using DeFindex's pre-built yield infrastructure instead of building in-house.

Templar, a lending protocol powered by NEAR's chain abstraction, launches on Stellar enabling users to deposit XLM and borrow stablecoins across multiple chains from a single wallet. The integration expands Stellar's RWA ecosystem and unlocks cross-chain liquidity.

Stellar has partnered with Chainlink to integrate CCIP, Data Feeds, and Data Streams into the Stellar ecosystem, enabling secure cross-chain asset transfers and institutional-grade tokenization while advancing financial inclusion for underbanked populations.

EquitX partners with Runtime Verification for a comprehensive security audit of its v1 core contracts ahead of its December mainnet launch on Stellar. The audit, supported by the Stellar Development Foundation's Soroban Audit Bank, ensures the protocol's synthetic equities are trustless, transparent, and robust. This step underscores EquitX's commitment to security as it introduces borderless access to equities.

Hoops Finance releases version 0.5.0, introducing a unified identity layer with WebAuthn passkeys, zero-knowledge SRP authentication, and seamless Stellar wallet integration via SEP-10. Developers gain enhanced API keys, token logos, and standardized data endpoints for easier integration. The update improves performance, security, and sets the foundation for upcoming Smart Accounts, Vault Rewards, and onchain risk algorithms on Stellar.

The Stellar i³ Awards 2025 recognized three standout projects at Stellar Meridian: Decaf won Impact for its non-custodial stablecoin app with 50k users, Etherfuse won Innovation for tokenized government treasuries and peso stablecoins, and DeFindex won Interoperability for its plug-and-play DeFi API for wallets.

Myosin hosted a marketing-focused event at Korea Blockchain Week in partnership with Stellar, featuring panels on crypto GTM strategies, a discussion on crypto and traditional finance convergence, and marketing roasts of projects including Blend Capital, a DeFi lending protocol on Stellar.

Normal Finance is building a platform to provide one-click diversified crypto exposure across chains without bridges or CEXs, solving fragmentation for everyday investors. They chose Stellar for its low costs, speed, scalability, global accessibility, and focus on real financial solutions over speculation. Currently, Normal has a live testnet and is preparing for mainnet launch on Stellar.

Hoops Finance shares their success in the Myosin x BuildOnStellar GTM Accelerator, winning best Go-To-Market Strategy by refining their messaging around Stellar-based Smart Accounts and APIs. They highlight their Meridian 2025 pitch in Rio and the launch of Trustfall: Vault Wars, a gamified DeFi experience on Stellar. The post outlines future plans to scale their innovative DeFi tools.