Stellar Ecosystem
News

ApiCharge, a Stellar-based API monetization platform, announces x402 compatibility and positions itself as a metachain abstraction layer for stablecoin payments. The service unifies server and facilitator roles, enabling AI agents and lightweight clients to purchase API access with just a signing key.

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: Circom (traditional constraint-based circuits), Noir (Rust-like circuit language), and RISC Zero (full program execution in a zkVM). Each approach offers different trade-offs in expressiveness, developer experience, and on-chain verification complexity.

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.

The Stellar Development Foundation introduced Meridian Pay, a production-ready smart wallet built on Stellar Mainnet that launched at Meridian 2025 in Rio de Janeiro. The wallet uses passkey-based authentication, eliminating seed phrases and passwords while enabling seamless onchain transactions with zero user-facing fees.

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.

Dfns introduces BYOABI, enabling clients to import smart contract ABIs and interact with them natively from Dfns wallets. This upgrades Dfns to manage full smart contract lifecycles like minting, burning, and pausing under its security and governance model. Future expansions include support for Stellar and other networks.

Freighter Wallet is a non-custodial browser extension for Stellar that enables secure transaction signing and dApp interaction while keeping private keys on the user's device. It serves as the primary gateway for Web3 participation on Stellar, with full Soroban smart contract compatibility.

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.

Inference, a formal verification framework, analyzes three WebAssembly-based blockchains for verifiability. Stellar Soroban emerges as the most feasible target due to its minimalist architecture and strict separation of business logic from infrastructure, unlike Polkadot's monolithic design.

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.

Trustless Work introduces payroll and contractor payment escrows built on Stellar, enabling organizations to manage compensation through auditable, on-chain escrow cycles with clear approval workflows and transparent fund allocation.

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.

This article describes the prototyping of Privacy Pools on Stellar's smart contracts platform, implementing a privacy-preserving protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs and Association Set Providers (ASPs) to enable private transfers while maintaining compliance standards.

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.

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's Soroban runtime engineers have integrated Solidity support into Soroban via Hyperledger Solang, enabling developers to write smart contracts in Solidity and compile them to WebAssembly. The Solang Playground Web IDE is now available for developers to write, compile, and deploy Solidity contracts on Soroban Testnet.

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.

Bitbond launches TokenTool API, an enterprise-grade platform for creating and managing digital assets across multiple blockchains including Stellar, without requiring deep blockchain expertise. The API offers pre-audited smart contracts, multi-chain support, and comprehensive token lifecycle management for businesses and developers.

The Trustless Work Backoffice dApp is a decentralized control panel on the Stellar blockchain for deploying, managing, and releasing funds from smart escrows without coding. It serves as a production-grade backoffice, testnet sandbox, and open-source template for escrow operations. Key features include role-based dashboards, API key management, and support for single or multi-release escrows.