Stellar Ecosystem
News

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q4 2024 report highlighting a transformative year with 18 billion network operations, $32 billion in payment volume, and significant ecosystem growth including 640% Soroban TVL expansion and Protocol 22 upgrade.

Executioners Esports publishes an educational guide on Stellar blockchain, covering its fast, low-cost payment infrastructure, the Stellar Consensus Protocol, and Soroban smart contracts. The article provides developer onboarding steps and real-world use cases including DeFi, NFTs, and gaming.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced a two-year partnership with OpenZeppelin to bring enterprise-grade smart contract standards and security tools to Soroban. The collaboration includes the Stellar Library, security audits, and open-source developer tools.

A developer tackles a challenge to create the smallest invokable Soroban smart contract on Stellar mainnet, beating the previous 66-byte record by using an empty export name. The solution shrinks the WASM binary to 39 bytes including the required metadata section. Mainnet transaction hashes are provided for upload and invocation.

DIA has deployed its price oracle infrastructure on Stellar's Soroban testnet, enabling developers to build DeFi applications with real-time market data feeds. The deployment was supported by a Stellar Community Fund award and provides access to price feeds for over 2,500 cryptocurrency tokens.

A tutorial demonstrating how to build a Soroban smart contract that automates savings by fetching real-time XLM prices from Reflector Oracles and triggering conversions when price thresholds are met.

USDx stablecoin from FxDAO protocol is now live on Soroswap Finance, the first DEX on Soroban Blockchain, with a $190,000 TVL liquidity pool for the XLM/USDx pair. Users can issue USDx by locking Lumens as collateral in FxDAO vaults for liquidity without selling assets. The article guides on acquiring, swapping, and providing liquidity for USDx on Soroswap.

Protocol 22 is coming to Stellar Testnet on November 12 and will go to Mainnet validator vote on December 5. The upgrade introduces constructors for Soroban contracts (CAP-0058) and BLS12-381 cryptographic host functions (CAP-0059), enabling more efficient smart contracts and advanced privacy features like zk-SNARKs.

Hana Wallet now integrates Soroswap, allowing users to easily swap Stellar tokens like XLM and USDC directly from their mobile devices. The article provides a step-by-step guide to installing Hana Wallet, setting it up for the Stellar network, and accessing Soroswap via the app's DApps directory. This enhances decentralized finance accessibility on the Soroban ecosystem without KYC requirements.

CoinFabrik shares insights from three major crypto conferences: Permissionless III highlighted Web3 marketing's growing importance, Meridian 2024 showcased Scout's positive reception in the Stellar ecosystem, and Avalanche Summit LATAM featured CyScout, their new CodeQL-based security tool for Solidity developers.

SorobanDomains introduces a new Key-Value storage contract on Stellar's Soroban platform, acting as a 'localstorage' for domains. It enables storing additional values like SEP-01 TOML file locations or IPFS CIDs for dApps. The contract is live on mainnet with a $PSD 100 registration fee.

zkCross Network announces Super Accounts on Stellar, powered by their Chain Abstraction Layer, enabling seamless 1-click cross-chain DeFi transactions without bridging or gas management. This integrates zkCrossDEX with Stellar's Soroban blockchain, supported by a Stellar Community Fund grant. The phased roadmap includes AMM DEX, staking, launchpad, and perpetuals trading.

Tansu, a Stellar dApp, introduces an on-chain 'Support' button for funding open source projects directly via Soroban Domains. This creates transparent, costless, and borderless funding using Stellar addresses and smart contracts. Future developments include DAO-based fund management through the SCF Build program.

Mercury has released Retroshades, a smart contract indexing technology designed specifically for Soroban-supporting chains. Retroshades allows developers to build custom indexers in minutes by defining data structures directly within smart contracts, eliminating the need to learn new technologies or manage complex infrastructure.

Tansu, a Soroban-based versioning dApp, launches v1 on Stellar testnet, allowing project registration and on-chain Git history tracking. It completes SCF28 activation award deliverables, including smart contracts with Soroban Domains support and open-source tooling. The team thanks the Stellar community and eyes a Build award next.

Technical comparison of three smart contract languages from someone who's shipped on all three. Solidity dominates by ecosystem size but carries well-known vulnerability classes. Soroban brings Rust's memory safety to Stellar with built-in resource metering. Plutus offers formal verification through functional programming but demands significant learning. Practical analysis of trade-offs for enterprise projects.

The Stellar Development Foundation and DEV announced the winners of the Build Better on Stellar: Smart Contract Challenge, with over $50,000 in prizes distributed across tutorial and dApp categories. Winners included projects like Soroban by Example, Entry X (decentralized ticketing), and DVILLA (sustainable e-commerce), with overall winners receiving $13,000 and all-expenses-paid trips to Meridian conference.

xyclooLabs announces new community indexes and dashboards functionality for Mercury, their data platform for Stellar developers. The update includes improvements to the zephyr-sdk with DashboardBuilder, backend infrastructure for creating and discovering indexes/dashboards, and a community section in the Mercury webapp.

Phoenix is a DeFi hub being built on Stellar's Soroban smart contract platform. The explainer video covers what Phoenix is and its role in the Stellar DeFi ecosystem.

Phoenix DeFi Hub has launched on Stellar's Soroban smart contract platform, starting with a decentralized exchange in May and planning an NFT marketplace and additional protocols. The platform aims to be a comprehensive DeFi solution leveraging Stellar's on/off-ramp infrastructure and stablecoin 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.

Tansu deployed its Soroban smart contract to testnet with event handling infrastructure now live. The governance platform released a Python library on PyPI. Upcoming milestones: dApp proof-of-concept, FastAPI backend, and continuous contract deployment.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q2 2024 quarterly report, highlighting network growth to 8.4 million addresses, real-world asset supply exceeding $598 million, and significant progress in tokenization and Soroban adoption. The report showcases achievements including WisdomTree's expanded retail access, $7.8 million in enterprise investments, and $5 million in Stellar Community Fund awards to 107 projects.

Rob Durst announces Digicus, a visual block-based IDE for Soroban smart contract development that aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers. The tool allows developers to visualize, understand, and edit Soroban contracts without requiring deep Rust expertise.

Tansu has received an SCF28 Activation award to build infrastructure that anchors Git commit hashes on Soroban. The system creates a decentralized record of code changes, helping maintainers verify project integrity and combat centralized platform risks without disrupting existing workflows.

The Stellar Development Foundation and DEV Community are launching the Build Better on Stellar: Smart Contract Challenge, running through August 18, offering a $50,000 prize pool and free trip to Meridian Conference for developers building dApps with Soroban smart contracts.

Soroban, Stellar's new smart contract platform launched with Protocol 20, enables developers to build DeFi applications for underbanked and unbanked populations with low fees and real existing infrastructure, addressing crypto's long-standing goal of financial inclusion.

BlockEden.xyz unveiled their Soroban Indexer and GraphQL at Stellar's Meridian conference in Madrid from September 26–28, 2023. The article shares their pitch deck with 13 slides showcasing the innovations. Contact details and source link are provided.