Stellar Ecosystem
News

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 Horizon 1.0 release, regulatory advocacy efforts, and the first enterprise fund investment in DSTOQ, a fintech company serving 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.

SDF hosted a webinar featuring Cowrie Integrated Systems, a Nigerian fintech company using Stellar to enable low-cost, instant payments into and out of Nigerian bank accounts via their NGNT stablecoin and anchor integration.

Stellar Development Foundation invested $715,000 in DSTOQ, a security token platform built on Stellar that tokenizes global assets like stocks for emerging market investors. This marks SDF's first enterprise fund investment.

Stellar Development Foundation announces its first investment through a new Enterprise Fund, committing $715K in lumens to DSTOQ, a Liechtenstein-based fintech enabling investment access in emerging markets via security tokens on Stellar.

Horizon 1.0, Stellar's open-source API, launches with a new ingestion engine that makes queries faster, more consistent, and less dependent on Stellar-Core. The major release includes breaking changes and new endpoints for asset trustlines, multi-sig account discovery, and network-wide offer filtering.

The Stellar Development Foundation joined the Blockchain Association, a crypto industry lobbying group, to advocate for favorable blockchain regulation and policy with US policymakers and Congress.

The Stellar Development Foundation joined the Blockchain Association to advocate for smart regulatory policy and help policymakers understand blockchain's potential to enhance the financial system and promote equitable access.

Bank von der Heydt, a 270-year-old Munich bank, partnered with Bitbond to tokenize securities on Stellar and issue a euro stablecoin for institutional private placements, launching a production version in April.

Stellar Development Foundation revamped Stellar.org with a new project directory, updated SDF mandate detailing treasury deployment, and lumen supply metrics documentation to improve ecosystem transparency and support for builders.

Stellar.org's new homepage features runnable code samples for network features like payments and asset issuance. To handle testnet resets every 3 months, the team built an automated script that checks for account existence and recreates necessary accounts, plus a function to return unused testnet lumens to Friendbot to prevent resource depletion.

Crypto.com added XLM to its Crypto Earn product, offering users up to 8% annual returns on Stellar deposits with weekly payouts and flexible terms.

The Stellar Winter Roundup 2019 recaps key achievements and events from December through October, including ecosystem expansion, the Meridian conference, lumen distribution updates, and new partnerships. Highlights feature SDF's new mandate, Horizon and Core releases, Stellar Community Fund voting, and integrations like Travala.com and BitGo support for XLM. It also announces new hires and job opportunities at SDF.

Stellar Development Foundation reflects on 2019 achievements: team grew from 11 to 56 employees, Stellar accounts doubled to 4.1M, protocol upgrades improved capacity and fairness, and ecosystem matured with stronger validator infrastructure and real use cases like AnchorUSD.

Keybase ended its Stellar Lumens airdrop after just 90 days due to spam attacks. The messaging platform received 2 billion XLM tokens to distribute over 20 months, but spam bots forced early termination with only 300 million XLM distributed instead.

Stellar has been running its own Lightning Torch since June 2019, a community experiment that passes XLM around the world to demonstrate the blockchain's base-layer transaction efficiency. The torch, initiated by Wouter Arkink, has covered nearly 500,000 kilometers with zero transaction fees and introduced challenges like claiming countries and recruiting famous participants.

StellarTerm is an open-source trading client for the Stellar Decentralized Exchange (SDEX) with local key storage for enhanced security. It offers instant login via secret key, Ledger hardware wallet support, multisig accounts, and advanced trading features like real-time charts and notifications. Desktop apps are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Franklin Templeton will use Curv's MPC wallet solutions to secure tokenized shares of its government money market fund on Stellar, enabling instant access and client autonomy over $700B+ in assets.

Saldo, a Mexican government-approved app, enables 20,000 migrant workers in the U.S. to send remittances home via Stellar's network using peso-backed stablecoins. At Stellar Meridian conference, builders emphasized regulatory compliance as essential for real-world adoption, contrasting with crypto's move-fast ethos.

Interstellar v4.0 (Voyager Update) released with major wallet improvements. New All-Spark feature enables asset transfers without trustlines or funded accounts. Comprehensive SEP6/24/10 anchor integration lets users deposit and withdraw directly in-app. Adds 11 new languages and enhanced security.