Stellar Ecosystem
News

The Stellar Dev Diaries series follows the Freelii team's journey building a remittance chatbot on Stellar, from hackathon wins through securing Stellar Community Fund grants to mainnet launch. Episode 2 covers their pivot strategy, Telegram mini app development, and use of Stellar Anchors for on-ramping.

This article explains composability in DeFi—the ability to combine different protocols and smart contracts to create innovative financial products. It highlights how Stellar's existing features like its DEX, multi-asset support, and path payments enable developers to build connected applications, contrasting DeFi's permissionless, transparent approach with traditional finance's siloed systems.

The Stellar Community Fund Kickstart #10, held in March 2025, accelerated 32 blockchain startups from 16 countries through a five-day design sprint. 28 teams received $290,000 in XLM awards, with standout projects like Abokyh, Dayfi, and DeFarm recognized for their Stellar integrations. Participants praised the mentorship on Stellar tools, smart contracts, and GTM strategies.

The Stellar Dev Diaries series follows Freelii's journey from hackathon win to funded startup building on Stellar Network. Episode 1 features founders José Toscano and Joseph Anthony discussing their path to mainnet launch, including use of Soroban's PassKeys feature and Stellar Community Fund support.

Stellar introduces Soroban, its WebAssembly-based smart contract platform built in Rust, enabling developers to create DeFi applications, tokenized assets, DAOs, and other decentralized applications while maintaining low costs and high security on the Stellar network.

An educational article explaining the distinction between composability and interoperability in Web3, with emphasis on how Stellar's modular development approach enables developers to build applications like LEGO bricks using tools like Stellar CLI, Lab, and SDKs.

Nansen and Slice Analytics released a comprehensive H2 2024 report on the Stellar ecosystem, highlighting Protocol 22's launch, Galexie data platform, Anchor Directory expansion to 180 countries, and significant partnerships with MoneyGram, Stripe, and Mastercard. On-chain metrics show steady growth with daily transactions reaching 2.4M and active addresses peaking at 172K, driven by regulatory optimism and ecosystem maturation.

This article explains composability in DeFi and blockchain development using a hot rod analogy, detailing how different protocols and smart contracts can integrate seamlessly on Stellar to create more powerful financial systems. It covers DeFi building blocks, composability benefits, TVL growth, and practical considerations for building composable projects on Stellar.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced the winners of a global challenge that received over 250 submissions from 20+ countries. The top three visionary ideas include The Crypto Oracle's education funding platform, José Toscano's biometric crypto wallet, and 8 other finalists spanning payments, real estate tokenization, carbon credits, and more.

The Stellar Development Foundation commissioned PwC to develop an addendum to the Blockchain Sustainability Framework addressing EU MiCA regulation requirements. The addendum provides methodologies for assessing sustainability metrics and applies them to benchmark the Stellar network's environmental performance.

Stellar Quest is a gamified platform for learning Stellar blockchain through interactive missions, from wallet setup to advanced transactions. Users cover topics like creating accounts, payments, trustlines, DEX offers, and path payments. It includes live Twitch streams and opportunities to win exclusive swag.

The Stellar Development Foundation's research team published a 2024 recap highlighting their expansion to two full-time researchers, three peer-reviewed publications on distributed computing and consensus algorithms, five research talks at major conferences, and funding for 14 academic research groups globally.

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 Community Fund (SCF) #32 awarded $1,377,495 worth of XLM to 17 projects, including wallets, DeFi platforms, payment solutions, and developer tools. The round received 78 submissions, with 40 being first-time applicants, demonstrating continued ecosystem growth and innovation.

Stellar RPC, formerly known as Soroban RPC, has been rebranded with Protocol 22 to serve as the unified data access layer for all Stellar developers. The rename reflects the tool's broader applicability beyond smart contracts and positions it as the recommended entry point for new builders, moving away from the increasingly impractical Horizon infrastructure.

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.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched #BetterOnStellar, a global campaign inviting innovators to share ideas for blockchain solutions across finance, creativity, and access. Winners share $30k in USDC awards, with the top entry earning $10k.

The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) #30 round awarded $2.17 million in XLM to 22 projects in the first round of SCF 6.0, including initiatives for DeFi, payments, humanitarian aid, NFTs, developer tools, and financial inclusion across the Stellar ecosystem.

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.

George Kudrayvtsev demonstrates how the Composable Data Platform (CDP) and Galexie enable efficient backfilling of Stellar RPC with historical ledger data in just 12 minutes—a task that would take over an hour using traditional captive core replay. The prototype required only 80 lines of Go code and showcases CDP's flexibility for building composable ingestion pipelines.

This article explores how passkeys—a secure, user-friendly authentication method already adopted in Web2—are being integrated into Stellar's blockchain to improve user experience and drive adoption. Stellar gained a significant advantage by implementing native secp256r1 support in Protocol 21, enabling passkey functionality directly at the protocol level rather than through third-party solutions.

Stellar launches Build Better, a community-driven initiative that collects ideas from the ecosystem across three focus areas (finance, creativity, access) and translates them into hackathon tracks. The program offers a $30K prize pool and aims to bridge Web3 vision with real-world implementation using Stellar's smart contract platform.

Stellar-core 22.1 will drop SQL support for ledger state and transaction history tables. The release introduces a new high-throughput HTTP query server with the `getledgerentryraw` endpoint as the replacement for direct SQL access.

A detailed recap of Meridian 2024's Dev Underground stage in London, where 80+ Stellar Community Fund winners pitched their projects over two days in a casual, collaborative environment. The article highlights standout projects, community collaborations, and the vibrant energy of builders across the Stellar ecosystem.

The Stellar Development Foundation has achieved a 9x speedup in Horizon reingestion by leveraging the Composable Data Platform (CDP) with precomputed ledger metadata, reducing full history reingestion from approximately 66 days to 7 days.

Protocol 22 is now live on Stellar Mainnet. This guide provides developers and businesses with upgrade instructions, key dates, release links for all Stellar infrastructure and SDKs, and important changes including the Soroban RPC rebrand to Stellar RPC and upcoming Horizon transaction meta defaults changes.