Stellar Ecosystem
News

Boundless has won a Stellar Community Fund Build Award to develop its milestone-based funding platform on Stellar. The platform uses Soroban smart contracts and escrow to ensure accountable, verifiable payouts for grants, bounties, and crowdfunding. This addresses key Web3 funding issues like upfront payments and lack of transparency.

SorobanDomains is upgrading to NFDs (Non-Fungible Domains) using the SEP-0050 NFT standard on Stellar's Soroban. A new Registry v2 removes collateral requirements in favor of yearly fees and adds Soroban Events for better indexing. Existing domain owners get 90 days to migrate for free before new registrations open.

This article describes the prototyping of Privacy Pools on Stellar's smart contracts platform, implementing a privacy-preserving protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs and Association Set Providers (ASPs) to enable private transfers while maintaining compliance standards.

KALE is a proof-of-teamwork farming game on Stellar that launched in November 2024 and became a major ecosystem phenomenon, driving significant smart contract activity, stress-testing the network for Protocol 23, and serving as a foundational project for composability experiments at HackMeridian 2025.

The Stellar network is introducing the X-Ray protocol upgrade, which adds native support for BN254 elliptic curve operations and Poseidon hash functions to enable developers to build zero-knowledge privacy applications. The upgrade, scheduled for testnet vote on January 7, 2026 and mainnet vote on January 22, 2026, establishes cryptographic foundations for privacy-preserving applications without compromising Stellar's transparency.

The article details the design philosophy behind Cyberbrawl, a blockchain game built on Stellar, emphasizing that fun and core game loops should not depend on blockchain finality. The author argues for prototyping simple loops first, targeting casual-midcore players, and using blockchain solely as a continuity layer for ownership and persistence. Stellar's speed and efficiency enable this seamless integration without disrupting gameplay.

Stellar's Soroban runtime engineers have integrated Solidity support into Soroban via Hyperledger Solang, enabling developers to write smart contracts in Solidity and compile them to WebAssembly. The Solang Playground Web IDE is now available for developers to write, compile, and deploy Solidity contracts on Soroban Testnet.

The Stellar Development Foundation disclosed a bug in Soroban Live State Prioritization (introduced in Protocol 23) that corrupted 478 data entries starting September 4, 2025. The issue was in the eviction mechanism that moved outdated versions of persistent entries to hot-archive storage instead of the latest versions, affecting network data consistency.

The Trustless Work Backoffice dApp is a decentralized control panel on the Stellar blockchain for deploying, managing, and releasing funds from smart escrows without coding. It serves as a production-grade backoffice, testnet sandbox, and open-source template for escrow operations. Key features include role-based dashboards, API key management, and support for single or multi-release escrows.

Space and Time now indexes Stellar blockchain data, enabling developers to build data-driven financial apps and smart contracts with access to verifiable historical, cross-chain, and offchain data.

EquitX partners with Runtime Verification for a comprehensive security audit of its v1 core contracts ahead of its December mainnet launch on Stellar. The audit, supported by the Stellar Development Foundation's Soroban Audit Bank, ensures the protocol's synthetic equities are trustless, transparent, and robust. This step underscores EquitX's commitment to security as it introduces borderless access to equities.

Tansu has been officially deployed on Stellar's mainnet with contract ID CDXINK2T3P46M4LWK35FVIXXHJ2XHAS4FOVCGVPJ63YV5OVTM24IY5BI. Users can view the contract on Stellar Expert and access the dApp at app.tansu.dev to register projects and secure software supply chains.

BPVentures and LightEcho announced a new Chainlink-compatible, SEP-40 compliant randomness feed for the Stellar Soroban ecosystem. Identified by the SEP-40 SYMBOL: RANDOM, it provides verifiable 32-byte random words for game developers via a standard oracle interface. This enables easy integration for games, mints, raffles, and procedural generation without custom code.

On October 9, SDF discovered a bug in Stellar's state archival feature (Protocol 23) that caused outdated entries to be archived and restored incorrectly. The network immediately paused archival eviction and deployed a patch to quarantine corrupted entries, affecting only 478 smart contract entries out of ~47 million ledger entries.

A comprehensive tutorial on implementing tokenized vaults on Stellar Soroban following the ERC-4626 standard pattern. The article explains vault mechanics, security considerations like inflation attacks, and details both read-only and state-changing vault functions for deposits, withdrawals, and asset conversions.

TokenOps leverages Stellar's Soroban smart contracts for scalable, low-cost token operations including airdrops, vesting, and TGEs. It offers 3-5 second settlement times, fixed fees, and real-time tracking with backend persistence. This enables efficient automation, transparency, and compliance for Web3 projects on Stellar.

Veridise has published a security checklist for Soroban developers to prepare for smart contract audits. The guide covers best practices and vulnerability prevention for building on Stellar's native smart contract platform.

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.

Boundless argues that Web3 crowdfunding remains broken despite blockchain promises. Upfront funding with zero accountability has replayed from ICOs ($5.6B raised, 8-10% delivered) through DAO grants (34% deliver on promises) to recent NFT rugs. They propose milestone-based escrows as the fix: funding locked until teams prove progress, with partial refunds if projects fail. Building on Stellar.