Stellar Ecosystem
News

Huma Finance closed a $38 million investment round ($10M equity, $28M in tokenized RWAs) led by Distributed Global with participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures. The funding will support expansion to Solana and Stellar's Soroban network.

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.

This article showcases real-world impact stories from the Stellar ecosystem, highlighting how stablecoins and blockchain technology are enabling financial inclusion in emerging markets. It features projects like Decaf, MoneyGram Access, Félix, Bitso, Vibrant Wallet, and ClickPesa that are bringing payments, remittances, and microfinancing to unbanked and underbanked populations globally.

The Stellar Community Fund launches version 6.0 with enhanced support for ecosystem projects, integrating a new Kickstart bootcamp program, streamlined Build Awards up to $150K, post-launch growth initiatives including DraperU's Embark Accelerator, and category-specific delegate panels for improved governance.

Puntored, a Colombian fintech serving low- and middle-income populations across Latin America, raised $2M from the Stellar Development Foundation's Enterprise Fund to expand its technological capabilities and enable cross-border transactions via the Stellar blockchain network.

Soroswap.Finance, the first DEX on the Soroban Blockchain in the Stellar ecosystem, announces the listing of $NGNC, a Naira-pegged stablecoin natively supported on Stellar. This enhances liquidity, FX utility, and cross-border payments for Nigerian users. Users can trade, add liquidity, and swap NGNC with assets like XLM, BTC, ETH, and USDC.

The Stellar Development Foundation introduced Galexie, the first component of the Composable Data Platform, a lightweight application that extracts and stores Stellar ledger data in cloud-based data lakes. Galexie decouples data extraction from transformation, enabling tools like Horizon and Hubble to access precomputed transaction metadata more efficiently than relying on Captive Core.

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.

The xRF token, utility cryptocurrency for the Reflector Oracle Network, is now available on Soroswap.Finance, the first DEX on the Soroban blockchain. It enables governance, rewards for node operators, and subscriptions for price feeds. This integration leverages Stellar's ecosystem for efficient DeFi trading.

Franklin Templeton expanded its tokenized money market fund FOBXX to Avalanche blockchain, three years after launching on Stellar. The fund now operates across multiple chains with $402 million in assets under management.

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.

The Stellar Development Foundation introduces the Composable Data Platform (CDP), a new open-source architecture that decentralizes data access on Stellar by breaking down monolithic tools like Horizon and Hubble into modular, configurable components. CDP enables developers to customize their data consumption patterns and infrastructure based on specific application needs.

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.

This article explains smart contract wallets (smart wallets) and their advantages over traditional crypto wallets, including enhanced functionality, security features, and passkey support. It highlights how Stellar's Protocol 20 and 21 enable passkey-powered smart wallets to improve user onboarding and accessibility.

Paltalabs led a developer workshop at ETHChile 2024 teaching Soroban smart contracts and Soroswap AMM mechanics. The session covered Stellar's cross-border payment design, contract fundamentals, liquidity pooling, and asset swaps for Latin American builders.

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.

The Stellar Development Foundation released a documentary called 'The Onchain Effect' showcasing how blockchain technology is solving real-world financial problems. The film tells the story of an Australian entrepreneur in Colombia who uses Stellar and the Decaf wallet to safely pay his employees in USDC, eliminating the need to carry dangerous amounts of cash.

Validation Cloud announced support for Stellar Horizon, offering high-performance Node API infrastructure with archive node data access. The service enables developers to build wallets, DEXs, and other applications on Stellar with improved performance and historical data querying capabilities.