DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Floripa Web3 event in Florianópolis on August 9, 2024 featured Nearx experts Lucas Bispo de Oliveira and Caio Mattos discussing Rust, Soroban SDK, and the free Stellar Bootcamp program for blockchain developers.
This article explains the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), Stellar's unique approach to blockchain consensus that prioritizes speed, reliability, and decentralization without resource-intensive proof of work. It covers key concepts like quorum sets, voting mechanisms, quorum intersections, and the security benefits of using nodes operated by well-known organizations.
ATHR introduces a novel ranking system for crypto assets based on all-time high rankings (ATHR), last year high rank, and last 3-month high rank, using historical data from CoinMarketCap. The approach analyzes ranking movements rather than absolute prices to account for interdependencies among assets. Stellar (XLM) appears at rank 39 with ATHR of 4, current rank around 31.
The Stellar Development Foundation announces its commitment to increasing gender diversity in the Stellar ecosystem and partnerships with SheFi to empower women builders. SDF will sponsor SheFi's Brussels summit in July, featuring keynotes on real-world blockchain use cases and an activation showcasing Stellar's new passkeys capability.
A step-by-step tutorial for setting up three Stellar Core validation nodes on Ubuntu 22.04, covering domain configuration, PostgreSQL setup, and Stellar Core installation with example configuration files.
Stellar and Soroban documentation sites have merged into a unified developer experience. The Stellar Development Foundation is launching the Deep Dive Docs Bounty program from May 29 to August 7, 2024, offering XLM rewards for community contributions to improve developer documentation.
Stellar Surge is a developer community program designed to engage African engineers and startups building on Stellar and Soroban, offering learning resources, innovation support, and funding opportunities including access to the Stellar Community Fund.
Draper University and the Stellar Development Foundation announced two new programs—the Astro Hacker House and Embark Accelerator—to support up to 80 startups building on Stellar and Soroban over the next two years, with a focus on AI integration and smart contract development.
The Defiant published an explainer video on Stellar's Soroban smart contracts platform, which expands the network beyond its original focus on low-cost payments to enable decentralized applications while maintaining support for underbanked regions.
This guide details how XLM holders can provide liquidity to the KSM/XLM pool on Zenlink DEX via the Amplitude network on Kusama. It covers setting up a Polkadot wallet, acquiring KSM and AMPE, bridging XLM using Spacewalk from Lobstr, and adding liquidity. The process enables earning rewards while enhancing liquidity in the Amplitude ecosystem.
This guide provides a detailed step-by-step tutorial on using the Spacewalk Bridge to transfer Stellar assets like stablecoins and XLM to the Pendulum ecosystem on Polkadot. It covers wallet setup with Lobstr, acquiring and exchanging assets, obtaining PEN for fees, and completing the bridge process. The bridge enables Stellar users to access DeFi opportunities on Pendulum, including upcoming XLM trading pools.
The Stellar Development Foundation ran a dogfooding experiment called the Okashi Cakewalk, a web-based smart contract game built on Soroban that enabled all SDF employees—regardless of technical background—to write, deploy, and invoke smart contracts. Over 170 NFTs were minted on Futurenet, demonstrating successful onboarding to Soroban development and providing valuable UX feedback to the Okashi team.
A technical guide comparing data types between Solidity (EVM) and Rust (Soroban), part 2 of a migration series. The article covers primitive and composite types, key differences like String vs. Symbol, and provides code examples for both languages.
Stellar Development Foundation co-founder Jed McCaleb discusses his journey as an innovator, from early blockchain challenges to current work in space habitation and AI, in the latest episode of the 'block by block' podcast.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and its implementation on the Stellar blockchain. It explains DeFi's core components—including blockchain, smart contracts, DEXs, and liquidity pools—and highlights how Soroban, Stellar's native smart contracts platform, enables developers to build DeFi applications with access to real-world financial rails.
A comprehensive tutorial on migrating smart contracts from Ethereum's Solidity to Soroban's Rust SDK, comparing the two languages and providing step-by-step examples of building a 'Hello World' contract in both environments.
The Stellar Development Foundation organized the Workshop on Heterogeneous Trust in Distributed Systems (HTDS) in October, bringing together 30 researchers to explore consensus mechanisms where validators independently choose which peers to trust—a key feature of Stellar and other networks.
Educational explainer on Stellar's Proof-of-Agreement consensus mechanism, using real-world analogies to explain how quorums, slices, and topens enable decentralized agreement without proof-of-work or proof-of-stake.
This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to deploying a Soroban RPC server on DigitalOcean Kubernetes using Stellar Development Foundation Helm charts. It covers cluster creation, Helm repository setup, configuration for testnet, Nginx Ingress installation, DNS setup, and verification. Benefits include improved reliability, control, and performance for Stellar smart contract interactions.
The Stellar Development Foundation released a comprehensive paper titled 'The Case for Open Systems: Creating an Interoperable, Integrated World,' exploring the historical context, principles, and real-world applications of open systems in fostering innovation and equitable technology access.
The Stellar Development Foundation published 'A Practical Framework for Decentralization,' a policy paper that provides a structured approach for evaluating and measuring decentralization in blockchain networks. The framework addresses how policymakers and regulators can assess decentralization across network structure, failure resistance, and decision-making processes.
Range CEO Andres Monteoliva spoke at the Modular Summit on security advantages of app-specific roll-ups over monolithic blockchains. Range provides intelligence and risk platforms for cross-chain stablecoin infrastructure, trusted by Stellar, Solana Foundation, Circle, and others. Their tools include Faraday for transaction routing and compliance, and a Stablecoin Explorer tracking nearly 200 stablecoins.
Australian crypto companies Upside and Stables announce a partnership to deliver Web3 education, events, and content, while providing Stables a Melbourne base at Upside HQ. Stables offers a digital wallet for spending, sending, and earning stablecoins, aiding businesses with treasury and payroll. The collaboration aims to boost crypto adoption in Australia.
The Stellar Development Foundation highlights five outstanding submissions from the Sorobounty Spectacular program, a content bounty initiative that encouraged developers to build Soroban dapps with educational tutorials. Featured projects include a regulated assets dapp, a snooker game, a farming game, a payment streaming app, and a Bitcoin price oracle.
The article explores the evolution of identity authentication from paper documents to Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), emphasizing self-sovereign identity on blockchain. It highlights benefits like ownership, privacy, interoperability, and real-world applications in government, refugees, finance, and more. It teases upcoming content on implementing DIDs on the Stellar network.
RPCiege Siege 4 launches with three new Soroban Rust coding challenges (Skirmish 8-10) designed to teach smart contract development while gamifying the learning experience with a fantasy narrative.
This educational article explains blockchain oracles as bridges between smart contracts and real-world data, covering their types, decentralization levels, and the oracle problem. It highlights oracle use cases in DeFi and mentions Soroban as Stellar's native smart contracts platform.