DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Hoops Finance, originating from a hackathon demo, has rapidly grown into a leading DeFi infrastructure on Stellar mainnet, securing $150K in Stellar Community Fund grants and winning multiple hackathons. The platform boasts strong traction with thousands of daily API requests, high user engagement, and tracks over $25M in TVL. It offers risk-assessed savings, AI analytics, and tools like Comet Swap to simplify DeFi for the masses.
OnlyDust launches Wave 2 with 7 open spikes focused on indexing escrow activity on Stellar and Soroban using SubQuery, The Graph, and Goldsky. The initiative aims to make escrow lifecycles observable, searchable, and composable for dashboards and integrations. Builders are invited to claim bounties and contribute to this observability layer.
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.
The Stellar Development Foundation outlines its 2025 roadmap progress toward achieving 5000 TPS and 2.5-second block times through major Stellar Core upgrades. The post details the first phase of parallelization: isolating transaction dissemination to separate threads, which is now enabled by default in Stellar Core v22.1.0, with signature verification parallelization coming in v22.3.0.
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.
Yugo Cabrio and Changmin Cho completed Milestone #1 of the UltraHonk Verifier for Soroban project, delivering a pure Rust implementation of the UltraHonk proof verifier that enables Noir/Barretenberg proofs to be verified on Stellar Soroban. After discovering incompatibility with the Taceo-labs extraction approach, they implemented the verifier from scratch in Rust with full CI/CD integration.
Stellar Lumens surged 14.3% to $0.293 on institutional volume following the release of Stellar Core v23.0.0rc2, though the rally reversed sharply to $0.2896 as short-term traders exited positions.
Trustless Work has released an SDK MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration for Cursor, enabling AI-assisted development of escrow flows. The MCP allows developers to scaffold escrow integrations directly from their editor with autocomplete, type safety, and reduced friction.
Trustless Work has released a major update introducing two escrow contract types: Single-Release for one-shot payouts and Multi-Release for milestone-based payments. The API has been restructured with type-scoped endpoints, and a new React library is available in beta. Upgraded Backoffice and Demo dApps provide enhanced UX and examples for developers building on Stellar.
Stellar released its 2025 developer roadmap, featuring upgrades to Lab 3.0/4.0 developer tools, Protocol 23 targeting 5,000 TPS, and enterprise payment features to position the network as a major DeFi and institutional blockchain.
Protocol 23 upgrade guide for Stellar developers and businesses, covering key dates, preparation steps, breaking changes, and release information for infrastructure, SDKs, and validators.
Stellar is advancing its blockchain with a public roadmap emphasizing scalability, usability, and developer tools like Soroban optimizations, Freighter wallet, AI assistants Stella and Contract Copilot, and integrations with OpenZeppelin. It powers real-world assets with $522 million on-chain and $17 billion in volume across 70 countries. The ecosystem offers robust support via the Stellar Community Fund and production-ready infrastructure.
Trustless Work launched v1 of its official NPM package (@trustless-work/escrow), enabling developers to integrate escrow infrastructure directly into their applications with minimal code. The release simplifies escrow deployment and is part of the project's roadmap toward mainnet launch.
The Stellar Development Foundation announced enhanced 2025 updates to the Soroban Security Audit Bank, which has conducted over 40 audits and deployed $3 million in support. The program now offers complimentary initial audits with co-payment refunds for swift vulnerability remediation, incentivized follow-up audits at TVL milestones, advanced security tooling, and enhanced audit readiness support.
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.
This article explains how to monitor Soroswap, the first DEX on the Soroban Blockchain within the Stellar ecosystem, using Alterscope's risk infrastructure. Alterscope provides real-time metrics on security, liquidity, development activity, audits, TVL, volume, and social engagement for informed DeFi risk management. Soroswap, developed by Palta Labs, offers fast, low-cost token swaps with strong security features including audits by OtterSec and Runtime Verification.
xcapit shares hands-on experience building on Soroban, Stellar's Rust-based smart contract platform. Covers architecture, tooling, developer experience, and why Soroban is optimized for financial instruments rather than general-purpose computation.
OpenZeppelin's Contract Wizard now supports Stellar's Soroban smart contracts platform, enabling developers to easily generate secure SEP-41 fungible tokens. This tutorial walks through using the wizard and Stellar CLI to create and deploy tokens on the Stellar testnet.
Blend V2 is launching with audits wrapping up soon. The migration allows lenders, borrowers, and backstoppers to move to V2 at their own pace while V1 remains operational, with key improvements including flash loan support, expanded pool parameters, and better liquidation mechanics.
Hoops Finance releases Version 0.4.0, introducing performance boosts via Incremental Static Regeneration, UI enhancements, and optimized builds for better DeFi experiences on the Stellar ecosystem. The team presented at ETH Denver, hosted by Caladan, outlining their vision for risk-assessed liquidity pools and smart savings. They invite users to test the platform on Testnet and join the community.
Goldsky offers a migration package for SimpleHash customers after its acquisition by Phantom, with services ending March 27, 2025. They provide priority onboarding, white-glove support, and 3 months free service. Stellar is listed among Goldsky's key clients relying on their high-performance infrastructure for token balances and transfers.
DappRadar integrates Stellar into its World's Dapp Store, allowing developers to list projects for free and users to discover dapps through onchain metrics. The integration brings Stellar's 18,000+ tracked dapps across 80+ blockchains to DappRadar's platform.
Flipside Crypto has integrated Stellar blockchain data, providing real-time access to transaction volumes, user activity, and custom dashboards for analyzing the network's onchain behavior.
A comprehensive guide to testing smart contracts on Stellar using Soroban, covering unit tests, integration tests, fork tests, fuzzing, differential testing, and code coverage strategies all built into the Rust SDK.
TokenOps offers a powerful API-first platform for Web3-native token vesting, cap table management, and compliance tracking. It provides specialized APIs for issuers, investors, and developers to automate token distribution, monitor portfolios, and gain real-time insights. Projects like Nuant have benefited from its seamless integrations and automation features.
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 Development Foundation announced a two-year partnership with OpenZeppelin to bring enterprise-grade smart contract standards and security tools to Soroban. The collaboration includes the Stellar Library, security audits, and open-source developer tools.
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.
