Stellar Ecosystem
News

AssetDesk has secured an R&D grant from the Stellar Community Fund to develop the AssetDesk protocol, a new money markets protocol for Stellar's Soroban smart contracts platform. The protocol enables decentralized borrowing and lending with features like margin trading, flash loans, NFT lending, and stablecoin markets. It aims to enhance capital efficiency in Stellar's DeFi ecosystem.

Aquarius announces participation in Stellar Community Fund round 15 to develop Soroban-powered AMMs on the Stellar network. The project aims to create Uniswap v2-style smart contracts, advanced AMM types, and AQUA reward distribution on Soroban futurenet. This builds on Aquarius' established liquidity incentivization system, which has distributed over $2.25M in rewards.

The Stellar Community Fund spotlights four SCF-awarded projects enhancing Soroban: Reflector (price feed oracle), Chainlink Oracles Relayer (VRF proxy), Elio DAO (decentralized governance), and Anchain.ai's Smart Contract Catalog (developer templates).

Source of Tales releases early access for Windows, Linux, and Android, featuring Stellar wallet login via Albedo. Funded by Stellar Community Fund #10 grant from Stellar Development Foundation, it implements blockchain-based authentication using a custom Mana Stellar Bridge. Further Stellar integrations for character data storage are planned.

The Stellar Community Fund published guidance on three best practices for successful SCF applications: demonstrate technical expertise with Soroban/Stellar, prove ecosystem impact, and define clear 3-month roadmaps with specific deliverables.

The Stellar Development Foundation showcases four Stellar Community Fund projects building on Soroban: Qolaq (mutual aid platform), Comet (weighted AMM), FxDAO (decentralized borrowing), and XycLoans (flash loans protocol). Each demonstrates innovative use cases for Soroban smart contracts on Futurenet.

Three Soroban projects born from hackathons and adoption programs showcase the ecosystem's early momentum. Sorobix, Chaincerts, and useSoroban.app demonstrate how developer tools and community support are accelerating smart contract adoption on Stellar.

The Stellar Newsletter highlights the Soroban Adoption Fund with $100M in opportunities, including a $10M Stellar Community Fund program for Soroban projects and developer initiatives like Sorobanathon. It covers UNHCR's nomination for blockchain impact award using Stellar for aid in Ukraine, partnerships like Beans App with MoneyGram, and technical updates on Pull Mode and Ubuntu upgrades. Community events, policy priorities, and developer resources are also featured.

The Stellar Community Fund launches SCF Startup Camp, a quarterly 5-day virtual bootcamp supporting up to 40 teams building on Stellar and Soroban. The first camp runs April 17-21, 2023, with finalists competing for $30,000 in XLM prizes and access to $150,000 in SCF Awards funding.

Stellar Development Foundation announced a $10 million Soroban-focused awards program through the Stellar Community Fund, offering developers up to $150,000 in XLM to build smart contracts, DeFi protocols, and dApps on Soroban ahead of its mainnet launch.

Vitreous, a transparent fundraising platform built on Stellar, won SCF #10. The platform uses Stellar's low fees and anchor network to enable global fundraising with community-enforced accountability through public transaction visibility.

Beans, a non-custodial wallet enabling zero-fee international payments on Stellar, shares insights on winning the Stellar Community Fund Round 10. The app leverages Stellar's fee sponsorship and on/off ramps to simplify cross-border transactions for mainstream users.

BP Ventures won a $125,000 grant from the Stellar Community Fund for its solution enabling FinTechs to leverage USDC on the Stellar blockchain for payments. The platform integrates with MoneyGram's USDC services for seamless cross-border remittances. This highlights growing adoption of Stellar and USDC in the remittance industry.

Litemint, a Stellar Community Fund winner, shares lessons from applying to SCF twice: identifying community gaps, engaging with the ecosystem, and launching products iteratively. The gaming and NFT platform has grown to 1,400+ NFTs and 65,000+ tradable units on Stellar.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced updates to the Stellar Community Fund for 2021, including two funding rounds distributing 7M XLM total, new voting mechanics with budget self-selection, and a community-driven panelist selection process.

Stellar Community Fund seed round №1 concluded with 8 projects receiving 5M XLM in grants. Winners include COINQVEST, Anclap, OptionBlox/YieldBlox, Task.io, Litemint, Leaf Global Fintech, Mojoflower, and Blocknify. Two additional rounds planned for 2021 with process improvements including Discord migration and budget requests.

Two Stellar Community Fund finalists, Mojoflower and Blocknify, showcase innovative use cases beyond payments: Mojoflower tokenizes share ownership for Icelandic regulators, while Blocknify uses Stellar as an immutable notary for e-signatures and document verification.

The Stellar Community Fund manager shares six strategies for winning SCF grants: serve your audience, pick the right fund tier, exceed guidelines, engage the community, emphasize marketing, and keep iterating. Success requires balancing technical quality with presentation and community involvement.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched Stellar Community Fund 2.0, splitting the grant program into two funds (Seed and Lab) and introducing a nomination panel plus quadratic voting to address voter fatigue and improve project selection fairness.