Stellar Ecosystem
News

The Stellar Development Foundation announced its 2022 roadmap, with smart contracts as the primary focus. SDF plans to research, develop, and collaborate with the community to implement smart contracts on Stellar while maintaining the network's core values of accessibility, security, and low fees.

SDF published a guidebook for regulators on designing CBDCs, explaining how central bank digital currencies can improve financial inclusion through open blockchains like Stellar, with features like programmability, compliance controls, and privacy protections.

Muxed accounts, a Stellar feature that maps a single address to multiple virtual accounts, are now live and available to all ecosystem products. All services must support sending to muxed accounts, while custodial services should implement them on the receive side to eliminate memo-related user errors.

Aquarius Governance is a decentralized system launched in November 2021 for AQUA token holders within the Stellar ecosystem to propose and vote on protocol changes. It features a 7-day discussion phase, fees for creation and publication that are burned for deflation, and a 10% quorum requirement. Successful proposals are executed by the Aquarius Signers Guild.

BravePay introduces liquidity rewards for the BRAVE-XLM pool on Stellar's AMM to boost adoption and returns beyond the standard 0.3% fee. The program adds 10% of the pool size in BRAVE rewards, distributed daily based on individual shares. It emphasizes fraud prevention, long-term commitments, and ecosystem growth.

Brave, a top-performing Stellar token, announces a redesigned staking rewards system to eliminate fraud from previous universal and trading rewards. The new Brave Staking offers tiered APYs up to 26% for 12-month periods, with flexible withdrawals and no minimums. Monthly burns of 24 million Braves and discontinuation of old rewards aim to stabilize price and foster long-term growth.

Stellar processed 2 billion operations in 2021, with relevant assets up 11.39% and transaction volume up 2.3x. The SDF invested $75.25M through its Enterprise Fund, launched educational programs reaching 10,000 students, and passed three protocol upgrades including AMM functionality and asset clawback features.

Velo Labs and FinClusive announced a strategic partnership to enable faster, cheaper cross-border payments by combining Velo's Stellar and BSC blockchain solutions with FinClusive's embedded compliance controls for remittances and value transfers.

Tribal Credit, Bitso, and the Stellar Development Foundation partnered to launch a cross-border B2B payment platform enabling Mexican businesses to send payments in pesos to the U.S. and receive dollars, leveraging Stellar's blockchain network for faster, cheaper transactions.

Tribal Credit, Bitso, and the Stellar Development Foundation launched a cross-border payment system enabling SMBs in Mexico and the U.S. to transact using USDC stablecoins, reducing costs and settlement times for international payments.

SDF CEO Denelle Dixon testified before the US House Committee on Financial Services on digital assets and blockchain's role in financial innovation, highlighting Stellar's use cases in cross-border payments, remittances, and stablecoin issuance while addressing regulatory frameworks and environmental sustainability.

Stellar Development Foundation introduces Starlight, a Layer 2 payment channel protocol achieving 1+ million payments per second while maintaining fast finality. The protocol leverages new Stellar protocol upgrades (CAP-21, CAP-40) and buffering techniques to enable high-throughput transactions between two participants.

YieldBlox introduces Protocol Owned Debt to eliminate liquidation cascade risks by having lending pools borrow from themselves and settle via fees, enhancing stability and capital efficiency on Stellar. It also upgrades to Growing Liability Tokens for better interest tracking and ~30% performance gains. Launch delayed by a month, with community calls planned for December.

Meridian 2021 tech talks are now available on demand, featuring SDF Engineering team presentations on Starlight payment channels, SPEEDEX decentralized exchange, Horizon 2.0, KYC processes, SDKs, Stellar Turrets for DeFi, Stellar Core, and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals.

This article details the main wallets of the Aquarius project on the Stellar blockchain, including their purposes, original AQUA token holdings, and Stellar Expert explorer links. It covers wallets for liquidity rewards, airdrops, community DAO, voting/staking rewards, emergency fund, investors, advisors/partners, and founders/team. The transparency leverages blockchain's verifiable data for AQUA holders to monitor easily.

Meridian 2021, Stellar's annual conference, concluded with keynotes on climate and economy, a MoneyGram partnership announcement enabling cash on/off ramps via 400k+ agent locations, ecosystem builder sessions, regulatory debates, and SDF's 2022 strategic priorities focused on utility, participation, ecosystem growth, inclusion, and policy impact.

MoneyGram and the Stellar Development Foundation launched a live pilot enabling cash deposits and international payments via Stellar USDC with near-instant settlement, marking one of the fastest blockchain integrations for a major money transfer company.

SPEEDEX is a new decentralized exchange design for Stellar that processes trades in batches, eliminating front-running, ensuring fair pricing for all users, and scaling throughput by parallelizing computation across multiple CPU cores.

This article explains how NFT ownership on the Stellar blockchain can be proven even in an apocalyptic scenario where services like IPFS, Stellar, and marketplaces are down. It relies on best practices from SEP-0039, using cryptographic CIDs for art and metadata, transaction reconstruction from genesis, and Ed25519 signatures. Basic math and offline computation suffice to verify ownership irrefutably.

Aquarius announces the Signers Guild to decentralize control over key AQUA wallets on the Stellar network, using native multisignature capabilities with up to 20 community members. The guild will manage 75%+ of uncirculated AQUA supply, including liquidity rewards, airdrops, and DAO funds, requiring majority approval for transactions. This initiative supports Aquarius's goals of enhancing SDEX and AMM liquidity through community governance.

Stellar launched Protocol 18 on Nov. 3, integrating native automated market maker (AMM) functionality into its Layer 1 DEX. The upgrade enables permissionless liquidity pool creation with fixed 0.3% fees, positioning Stellar as the first L1 blockchain with AMM capabilities built directly into its protocol.