Stellar Ecosystem
News

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.

Stellar x Rise's October 2025 monthly update highlights expansion across Asia with workshops in Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and Turkey. Key events included bootcamps producing over 100 new projects in India, a nationwide workshop series in Turkey, and an online builder challenge. Upcoming events feature the Bosphorus Hackathon in Istanbul and more workshops.

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 The issue was in the eviction mechanism that moved outdated versions of persistent entries to hot-archive storage instead of the latest versions, affecting network data consistency.

Stellar's Q3 2025 showed strong ecosystem growth with 1B+ operations processed, $562M RWA market cap, and 71% DeFi TVL growth. Major institutional partnerships including Visa, PayPal, and MoneyGram expanded adoption, while developer activity surged 37% YoY and smart contract invocations hit 1M daily.

A Stellar ambassador recounts their experience at the Avalanche Build hackathon, emphasizing collaboration, community, and interoperability across blockchain ecosystems. They highlight learning from diverse participants, using tools like Vibecoding and AI, and their team's 3rd place finish. The event reinforced the value of open communities bridging networks like Stellar and Avalanche for real-world impact.

Stellar partnered with Rise In to host Hack Pera, Turkey’s largest IRL Web3 hackathon during Istanbul Blockchain Week in June 2025, attracting 200+ developers and resulting in 72 projects. Ten teams won shares of $25,000 in prizes, with one launching on Stellar mainnet and gaining 100+ users immediately. The event featured strong mentorship, high participant satisfaction (4.86/5), and a focus on building real on-chain value in the Stellar ecosystem.

Stellar expanded into the Turkish market in 2025 through a strategic four-phase plan by Rise In, starting with developer education workshops and a mini-hackathon. This led to Hack Pera, Turkey's largest Web3 hackathon with 72 projects and $25K prizes, followed by a massively popular Stellar Sunset Party and a prominent booth at Istanbul Blockchain Week. The initiative resulted in 1,646 learners, 130+ projects, and projects advancing to Stellar's $150K Build Grant Program.

Protocol 24 is a stability upgrade for Stellar that fixes a bug in the state archival feature. The upgrade was completed on mainnet on October 22, 2025, with infrastructure operators and validators required to update their software.

On October 9, SDF discovered a bug in Stellar's state archival feature (Protocol 23) that caused outdated entries to be archived and restored incorrectly. The network immediately paused archival eviction and deployed a patch to quarantine corrupted entries, affecting only 478 smart contract entries out of ~47 million ledger entries.

Cursor, an AI-powered code editor, is promoted for students worldwide, offering free Pro access with a university email. It accelerates coding, problem-solving, and project execution, with a livestream tutorial demonstrating a dApp build using Next.js and Stellar Wallet Kit. The article highlights its benefits for students in Latin America building on Stellar, from smart contracts to DeFi protocols.

The HackMeridian hackathon was an intense and engaging event where participants developed projects using Stellar ecosystem tools. Networking, one-on-one mentorships, and workshops provided practical learning in Web3 and blockchain development. The event highlighted community collaboration and open innovation.

Stellar Development Foundation outlines a three-part strategy to bring privacy to Stellar while maintaining openness and compliance. The approach includes funding research, building zero-knowledge infrastructure, and developing open-source privacy solutions like confidential tokens.

The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its comprehensive strategy for implementing privacy on the Stellar blockchain while maintaining openness and compliance. The approach combines opt-in, configurable privacy at the application layer with three key work streams: supporting research and innovation, investing in core privacy infrastructure like zero-knowledge proofs, and building open-source solutions including confidential tokens.

Stellar completed a mainnet vote to launch Protocol 23, introducing eight Core Advancement Protocols that enable parallel smart contract execution, faster transaction processing, and improved scalability. The upgrade comes as Stellar's DeFi ecosystem surges with institutional adoption, including Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund and Circle's USDC.

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.

Stellar Development Foundation details major upgrades to Stellar Core aimed at achieving 5000 TPS and reducing block time to 2.5 seconds. The improvements parallelize transaction dissemination, consensus voting, and block execution across separate threads, with v22.1.0 already deployed and showing significant main thread pressure reduction.

Stellar Protocol 23, named Whisk, introduces unified events and parallel transaction processing to improve developer experience and network scalability. The protocol launches September 3rd and includes fee reductions, state archival foundational work, and configurable network parameters.

A comprehensive guide to 'vibe coding'—using AI and large language models to assist with software development. The article covers best practices for prompting, providing context to AI models, and recommends tools including AI code editors, various LLMs, and MCP servers to enhance the development workflow.

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.

Normal announces the hiring of full-stack engineer Jay Malve to bolster its team ahead of the Normal Protocol's launch on the Stellar blockchain mainnet. Jay, a hackathon winner with blockchain experience from ETH Denver, will enhance platform usability and development. The protocol offers custom crypto indexes, trading of top 200 cryptocurrencies, and DeFi features like lending and borrowing.

Stellar has launched RPC integration with a ledger data lake, enabling developers to access any historical ledger from genesis to present through RPC queries. The feature uses SEP-0054 standardized format and can be accessed via public data lakes or self-hosted using Galexie, with the getLedgers endpoint now supporting full historical data retrieval.

Trustless Work launches Vibe Coding, a new documentation section that provides AI-ready prompts and global context for developers to build escrow-powered applications using AI tools like GPT-5 and Claude. The guide includes step-by-step workflows, coding standards, and verification checklists to ensure production-ready code.