DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
A comprehensive guide explaining authentication and authorization mechanisms in blockchain, with specific focus on how Stellar and Soroban implement these security features through digital signatures, multisig, thresholds, and smart contract-based account abstraction.
Stellar Anchors serve as bridges between traditional finance and the Stellar blockchain, enabling fiat-to-digital asset exchanges, but face trust issues due to centralization. The new Anchor Transparency Node, powered by Log Store Network, provides verifiable transparency for off-chain transactions. This enhances trust, supports real-world assets, and fosters inter-business confidence in the Stellar ecosystem.
The Stellar Development Foundation has decided to disarm its validators and postpone the Protocol 20 upgrade scheduled for January 30, 2024, following ecosystem concerns about a discovered bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0 affecting fee bumps for Soroban transactions.
The Stellar Development Foundation disclosed a bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0 affecting fee-bumped Soroban transactions, where refunds are incorrectly sent to the sponsored account instead of the sponsor. SDF decided to proceed with the Protocol 20 upgrade vote on January 30 as planned, citing low risk during early Soroban phases and the availability of mitigation best practices.
Range announces a long-term security partnership with Margined Protocol to enhance security for its on-chain perpetuals and vaults on Cosmos. Range will provide customized monitoring, analytics, risk dashboards, and incident response tools. Margined is innovating DeFi perpetual products on CosmWasm networks.
Range partners with Oak Security to deliver end-to-end security for Cosmos projects, extending audits into continuous monitoring. This addresses limitations like dynamic codebases and third-party risks. Range, trusted by Stellar among others, provides customized real-time security tools.
Range CEO Andres Monteoliva spoke at the Modular Summit on security advantages of app-specific roll-ups over monolithic blockchains. Range provides intelligence and risk platforms for cross-chain stablecoin infrastructure, trusted by Stellar, Solana Foundation, Circle, and others. Their tools include Faraday for transaction routing and compliance, and a Stablecoin Explorer tracking nearly 200 stablecoins.
Range CEO Andres Monteoliva discusses mitigative measures for blockchain bridge exploits at the DeFi Security Summit. The talk covers types of bridges and security mechanisms like rate limits and circuit breakers. Range, trusted by Stellar and others, provides cross-chain stablecoin infrastructure with compliance and risk tools.
Stellar Development Foundation partners with Certora to conduct security audits for Soroban, its upcoming WebAssembly-based smart contracts platform. The formal verification tools will provide continuous integration security checks as the platform approaches mainnet launch in early 2025.
The article explores the evolution of identity authentication from paper documents to Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), emphasizing self-sovereign identity on blockchain. It highlights benefits like ownership, privacy, interoperability, and real-world applications in government, refugees, finance, and more. It teases upcoming content on implementing DIDs on the Stellar network.
The Stellar Development Foundation's Twitter account was compromised via SIM swap attack on July 8, 2023, used to spread phishing scams. SDF regained control within 6 hours and upgraded security protocols across all platforms to use stronger authentication methods like security keys.
Carole House, former White House cybersecurity director, discusses crypto's role in financial crime investigations, regulatory enforcement, and the push for an enabling US regulatory environment for digital currencies.
OG Technologies has sponsored Public Node's Tier 1 Stellar validator node Hercules, covering its hardware costs. This marks them as the second business sponsor for Public Node. The sponsorship highlights growing interest in the Stellar blockchain for Web3 solutions.
The Stellar Development Foundation launched a new bug bounty program on HackerOne focused on Soroban, the network's smart contract platform. The program offers rewards up to $50k for critical vulnerabilities, with higher bounties as Soroban matures toward Mainnet launch.
Tomer Weller from Stellar Development Foundation interviews Cubist co-founders Fraser Brown and Riad Wahby about building security-focused developer tools for cross-chain Web3 development. Cubist received a Stellar Bridge Bounty grant and discusses why they integrated with Stellar.
AnChain.AI, a Web3 security firm, integrated with Stellar to provide AI-powered risk management and fraud prevention tools for developers building on the network. The integration enables Stellar developers to access AnChain.AI's security solutions from the earliest phases of development.
MYKOBO, issuer of the EURC euro stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain, assures users of its secure and audited reserves amid the USDC depeg event. The company highlights its robust reserve management and adherence to regulations, positioning EURC as a stable bridge between European finance and blockchain. Monthly attestation reports are available for transparency.
This article explains why Stellar requires rigorous testing of blockchain upgrades before deployment to mainnet, and details how Stellar Supercluster—an automated testing framework—enables developers to validate code changes in simulated network environments.
Stellar Development Foundation explains why Soroban's initial release uses the WASMI interpreter instead of a JIT compiler, citing security concerns, simplicity, and the complexity of integrating JIT with blockchain-specific requirements like metering.
Merkle Science, a Web3 risk and compliance platform, partnered with Stellar Development Foundation to bring its Compass transaction monitoring tool to the Stellar network, providing developers and operators with institutional-grade security and compliance solutions.
Starbridge protocol uses Stellar's existing features to enable secure token bridging between Ethereum and Stellar without smart contracts. The team formally verified the protocol with Ivy to ensure users cannot double-spend or exploit withdrawal and refund mechanisms.
The Stellar Development Foundation released an updated security guide covering common scams targeting the Stellar community, including phishing, support fraud, look-alike assets, and false claims. SDF clarifies it never asks for private keys, controls accounts, or freezes funds, and provides guidance on protecting yourself and reporting fraud.
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.
The Stellar Development Foundation executed a Protocol 16 upgrade on April 10 after an outage on April 6 caused validator and Horizon nodes to go offline. The upgrade fixed the issue affecting multiple nodes without impacting network stability.
Stellar public network validators voted to upgrade to Protocol 16 on April 10, 2024, to resolve an issue that caused nodes to go offline. The upgrade took effect immediately, and node operators need to install compatible software to avoid disruptions.
Stellar Development Foundation validator nodes and Horizon API went offline April 6, 2021, causing transaction processing delays and exchange withdrawal halts at Binance, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp. The network recovered within hours with SDF restoring services by April 7.
