Stellar Ecosystem
News

Meridian 2025, the Stellar Development Foundation's flagship conference held in Rio de Janeiro, showcased major advancements in the Stellar ecosystem under the theme 'The Blueprint.' Key highlights included Soroban smart contract launches, over $3 billion in RWA tokenizations, PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin integration, and new partnerships. The event solidified Stellar's leadership in real-world financial applications and announced Meridian 2026 in Abu Dhabi.

The article argues that Web3, including blockchain technologies, may succeed like cloud computing by becoming invisible infrastructure for developers rather than a consumer-facing product like ChatGPT. It outlines key barriers to adoption such as poor UX, fragmentation, unclear regulations, and onboarding challenges, and emphasizes the need for unique value propositions like trustless coordination. A linked post highlights Stellar's role in bridging assets with Near intents, tying into broader interoperability discussions.

A Stellar Development Foundation Senior Marketing Advisor shares their first-month experience joining @StellarOrg to lead APAC strategy. They highlight Stellar's focus on real-world financial problems, the recent Soroban smart contract upgrade enabling complex dApps, and opportunities for founders and developers to build on the ecosystem.

The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its comprehensive strategy for implementing privacy on the Stellar blockchain while maintaining openness and compliance. The approach combines opt-in, configurable privacy at the application layer with three key work streams: supporting research and innovation, investing in core privacy infrastructure like zero-knowledge proofs, and building open-source solutions including confidential tokens.

Stellar completed a mainnet vote to launch Protocol 23, introducing eight Core Advancement Protocols that enable parallel smart contract execution, faster transaction processing, and improved scalability. The upgrade comes as Stellar's DeFi ecosystem surges with institutional adoption, including Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund and Circle's USDC.

Certora organized the first formal verification contests for Rust-based Soroban smart contracts on Stellar, partnering with Code4rena and Cantina. The contests for Blend v2 and Aquarius protocols featured a 40,000 USDC prize pool and used mutation testing to evaluate specifications. They demonstrated the effectiveness of Certora's Sunbeam prover in securing DeFi protocols on Stellar.

Hoops Finance's CTO Tim Baker details their indexer upgrades on Stellar for Protocol 23 support, resumable ingestion, and historical contract specs. They store raw transaction data before parsing, resume from exact pages to avoid re-ingestion, and maintain historical WASM bytecode to correctly parse upgraded contracts. This ensures precise, durable data across Postgres, MongoDB, and Neo4j for market analytics and dashboards.

Stellar Development Foundation details major upgrades to Stellar Core aimed at achieving 5000 TPS and reducing block time to 2.5 seconds. The improvements parallelize transaction dissemination, consensus voting, and block execution across separate threads, with v22.1.0 already deployed and showing significant main thread pressure reduction.

Tomer Weller (SDF CPO) and Kostas Ferles (Veridise) discuss the Soroban Security Audit Bank, an SDF program funding third-party security reviews for Soroban projects. The initiative represents a proactive security shift, and Weller unpacks how projects access audits and what common vulnerabilities to avoid when building on Soroban.

Trustless Work released Escrow Blocks, a production-ready React library that provides pre-built UI components and providers for integrating stablecoin escrows into applications in minutes. The library abstracts away smart contract complexity, enabling developers to build escrow flows from funding through milestone approvals and disputes without extensive development time.

CHATS is a blockchain-powered platform revolutionizing humanitarian aid distribution with transparency, smart contracts, and direct cash/voucher assistance to vulnerable communities. It runs on multiple chains including Stellar and Polygon, using non-custodial, gasless smart contracts and stablecoins for secure, efficient fund disbursement. Key features include offline NFC transactions, real-time dashboards, and fraud prevention, benefiting NGOs, donors, vendors, and beneficiaries.

A comprehensive guide to 'vibe coding'—using AI and large language models to assist with software development. The article covers best practices for prompting, providing context to AI models, and recommends tools including AI code editors, various LLMs, and MCP servers to enhance the development workflow.

A comprehensive tutorial on building a Stellar smart contract that uses Reflector oracle to create a EUR price prediction market. The guide covers contract initialization, oracle integration, storage patterns, token transfers, and verification logic using Soroban.

Certora Prover Version 8.1.0 introduces breaking changes including minimum Java 19 and Python 3.9 requirements, default sanity checks, updated requireInvariant semantics, and dedicated commands for Solana and Soroban verifications. New features include CVL formatter, re-routing summaries, transient storage hooks, and Foundry remappings support. Users must review specs and workflows before upgrading.

Trustless Work explains how non-custodial, milestone-based escrows solve crowdfunding challenges by ensuring funds are only released when agreed conditions are met. The platform offers flexible roles, transparent on-chain tracking, and multiple integration options for crowdfunding platforms.

An educational guide on using Blend, a permissionless lending protocol on Stellar, to transfer funds between accounts while avoiding cryptocurrency exchange rate volatility by borrowing XLM as collateral.

SDF plans to scale Stellar Core to 5000 TPS in 2025 through Protocol 23, parallel execution, decoupled consensus, aggressive caching, and improved benchmarking. These upgrades enable Soroban to handle higher transaction volumes without requiring node operators to upgrade hardware.

Mercury, a Stellar ecosystem runtime platform, is shifting to a Light Client deployment model that unbundles data sourcing, execution, and delivery into modular, open-source components. This redesign reduces operational overhead while preserving Mercury's Zephyr and Retroshades runtime technology and enabling third-party infrastructure operators to run Mercury services independently.

A developer shares her firsthand experience winning a track at Casa Builder México 2025 hackathon, building a Stellar/Soroban smart contract project with a mixed Web2/Web3 team despite having no prior Rust or Stellar experience. She details the technical stack, timeline, challenges, and key lessons learned about participating in hackathons.

The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 scalability roadmap to increase Stellar Core's theoretical throughput to 5000 TPS through five key initiatives: Protocol 23 with multi-threaded smart contract execution, increased parallelism in Core, decoupling consensus from execution, aggressive caching for state loads, and improved benchmarking frameworks.

Trustless Work participated in Casa Builders CDMX, a Stellar-hosted hackathon in Mexico focusing on financial inclusion, digital identity, and public good transparency. Their team built Pacto, a decentralized P2P stablecoin ramp using Trustless Work's programmable escrow, and won the event. The hackathon united Latin American builders, with strong Costa Rican representation.