Stellar Ecosystem
News

SatoshiPay raised $550,000 in XLM via convertible loan from Stellar Development Foundation to launch a B2B instant money transfer service on Stellar, processing transactions in 5 seconds with minimal fees.

The Stellar Development Foundation converted its $550,000 Series A pledge to SatoshiPay into a loan after the coronavirus pandemic derailed the funding round, providing the micropayments firm with 12 months of runway while it develops new B2B solutions.

Stellar Core Protocol 13 introduces three major features: fee bumps for flexible transaction fee management, fine-grained asset authorization for regulated assets, and multiplexed accounts with built-in memos for custodial services. The public network will vote to upgrade on June 18, requiring all ecosystem participants to update their software.

The Stellar Development Foundation released a daily-updated analytics dataset on Google BigQuery, enabling 10-100x faster queries across the entire history of Stellar network transactions. The dataset includes accounts, ledgers, operations, trades, and other ledger state information, with free trial access available through Google Cloud.

Stellar Development Foundation aims to become the global payments standard within 5 years, with CEO Denelle Dixon highlighting CBDCs as a key opportunity. The foundation is pursuing government adoption of CBDCs on Stellar's network, though founder Jed McCaleb acknowledges this remains early-stage. Protocol 13 and Horizon 1.0 upgrades are planned for June.

Stellar co-founder Jed McCaleb stated at Consensus: Distributed that no crypto projects are currently making a real difference in people's lives beyond speculation. He argued crypto startups should focus on building useful products rather than bank partnerships and business development deals.

The Stellar Development Foundation invested $5 million in Abra, a crypto financial services app operating in 155 countries, to support Abra's integration with the Stellar blockchain and expand financial services globally.

The Stellar Development Foundation invested $5 million in Abra, a crypto wallet service, to integrate Stellar's blockchain into Abra's payment and investment products. The partnership aims to expand financial services on Stellar and improve access to on and off ramps for traditional finance.

The Stellar Foundation partnered with blockchain forensics firm Elliptic to help Stellar-based businesses screen transactions for money laundering, sanctions, and compliance risks. The service is optional for businesses; XLM wallet users won't be automatically surveilled. Stellar argues regulatory compliance and privacy can coexist.

The Stellar Development Foundation's web products team is seeking community feedback on a redesigned version of the Stellar developer documentation and API reference. The new docs feature improved navigation, modular learning paths, and updated content while maintaining existing functionality.

The Stellar Development Foundation explains Issuer-Enforced Finality, a key feature enabling stablecoin issuers to maintain authoritative control over asset ownership on a permissionless network, contrasting Stellar's approach with Ethereum's vulnerability to double-spend attacks.

The Stellar Development Foundation will present at Consensus: Distributed 2020, sharing updates on network growth, strategic investments, and ecosystem success stories focused on interoperability and financial inclusion.

The Stellar Development Foundation appointed Lin-Hua Wu (Dropbox CCO) and Ronaldo Lemos (Brazilian tech lawyer and academic) to its board of directors, expanding the board to five members to strengthen governance in communications, policy, and regulatory affairs.

The Stellar Development Foundation reflects on why open source is the right model for building networks, highlighting documentation, transparency, collaboration, and diversity as key pillars that enable Stellar to thrive across borders and time zones.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q1 2020 quarterly report, highlighting progress on strategic growth pillars including Horizon API improvements, policy advocacy, marketing initiatives, and a strategic investment in DSTOQ to expand financial access in emerging markets.

SEP-29 enables exchanges and wallets to solve the "forgotten memo" problem on Stellar. Exchanges can now require memos by setting a simple data entry flag, while wallets upgraded to the latest SDK will automatically prevent memo-less payments to those addresses.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced a 2.5M XLM donation-matching program for April in partnership with Lumenthropy, supporting six charities including UNICEF, The Tor Project, and Watsi. The SDF will provide initial 100,000 XLM donations to each organization and match community contributions weekly.

Nodle, an IoT platform that processed ~1M daily microtransactions on Stellar, is migrating to Polkadot's Substrate network to build its own blockchain called Arcadia. The team cited need for custom blockchain functions beyond Stellar's capabilities, though plans a future bridge between the networks.