Stellar Ecosystem
News

Eiger, a Rust-focused web3 engineering firm, published its first newsletter showcasing two years of growth to 40 people, recent blog posts on Soroban tooling (Nebula), privacy protocols, and partnerships with Fireblocks, plus updates on partner projects like Elusiv's private swaps on Solana.

Obsrvr provides blockchain infrastructure solutions tailored for the Stellar.org network and Soroban smart contracts platform. Their offerings include the Obsrvr Gateway, a managed service combining Horizon API and Soroban RPC servers, and Obsrvr Nodes for customizable, dedicated instances. These tools simplify blockchain adoption, enhance security, and enable businesses to integrate seamlessly with Stellar.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q3 2023 report highlighting major progress on its roadmap, including Soroban's advancement toward Mainnet launch, security partnerships with Certora, enhancements to the Anchor Platform and Wallet SDK, and significant ecosystem milestones like Circle's EURC stablecoin launch and MoneyGram's planned wallet integration.

The Stellar Development Foundation announced updates to the Stellar Disbursement Platform (SDP), an open-source tool for bulk payments that now supports supplier payouts, global payroll, government transfers, and enterprise remittances. The platform features self-hosting, on-demand wallet creation, multi-level access controls, and support for any Stellar-based digital asset.

Meridian 2023, the annual Stellar conference held in Madrid, showcased major ecosystem developments including MoneyGram's non-custodial wallet launch, Circle's EURC stablecoin deployment, and significant upgrades to developer tools like the Anchor Platform and Stellar Disbursement Platform.

The Stellar Anchor Platform now supports two on and off-ramp standards, enabling businesses to integrate cross-border payments and fiat-to-digital asset exchange on Stellar. Companies like Banxa and Flutterwave are already using the platform to expand their payment services across regions.

RPCiege Siege 4 launches with three new Soroban Rust coding challenges (Skirmish 8-10) designed to teach smart contract development while gamifying the learning experience with a fantasy narrative.

Soroban has achieved feature completeness after a year of public development through 10 preview releases, with over 70 ecosystem projects now building in parallel. The platform is closing in on a stable release candidate with a renewed focus on developer experience, tooling, and documentation.

The Stellar Development Foundation joined the Bytecode Alliance as only the second blockchain member, positioning itself to influence WebAssembly standards and advocate for blockchain developers' needs in the Wasm ecosystem.

Stellar launched its open-source Disbursement Platform globally, enabling fast, low-cost bulk payments for gig workers, payroll, and aid distribution across 180+ countries with real-time tracking and instant cash conversion.

The Stellar Community Fund supports 70+ Soroban projects with educational tools and developer resources. Featured tools include Soroban-React, useSoroban.app, Soroban Learn, Sorobix, SoroSorcerer, and AnChain.AI's smart contract catalog, all designed to lower barriers to entry for Rust and smart contract development.

This article outlines the essential building blocks required for a thriving smart contract ecosystem on Soroban, including financial protocols (AMMs, lending markets), data access tools (oracles, indexers), user interfaces (wallets, block explorers), and security mechanisms. It demonstrates how these interconnected components enable real-world DeFi use cases like decentralized lending.

A comprehensive guide to Rust development for smart contracts on Soroban, covering setup, language advantages over Solidity, and resources from the Stellar Development Foundation for learning and building.

The Stellar Development Foundation shared progress on Soroban's Minimum Viable Ecosystem, outlining priority building blocks like financial primitives, data tools, and wallets needed before mainnet launch this fall. The foundation is actively funding projects through the Stellar Community Fund and inviting developers to help shape the platform.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched Hubble, a BigQuery-based analytics dataset offering complete historical records of the Stellar blockchain. Hubble enables complex data analysis without maintaining full history databases, supporting large-scale computing and historical applications previously difficult to implement.

The Stellar Community Fund spotlights four SCF-awarded projects enhancing Soroban: Reflector (price feed oracle), Chainlink Oracles Relayer (VRF proxy), Elio DAO (decentralized governance), and Anchain.ai's Smart Contract Catalog (developer templates).

Tech Talks with Tomer Episode 3 Season 2 features Chad Ostrowski from Aha Labs discussing smart contract development across NEAR, Soroban, and CosmWasm. The video series hosted by Tomer Weller, VP of Product at @StellarOrg, explores innovations in blockchain engineering.

Stellar Ramps enables digital wallets to connect to a global network of anchors for on and off-ramp services through standardized integrations, allowing seamless fiat-to-crypto conversions across 180+ countries without custom builds per anchor.

The Stellar Development Foundation launched a new bug bounty program on HackerOne focused on Soroban, the network's smart contract platform. The program offers rewards up to $50k for critical vulnerabilities, with higher bounties as Soroban matures toward Mainnet launch.

Source of Tales, revived via a Stellar Community Fund #10 grant, launched early access on Windows, Linux, and Android with Stellar wallet login via Albedo. The implementation uses a NodeJS-based bridge to securely connect the game to wallet authentication without storing sensitive keys.

Tomer Weller from Stellar Development Foundation interviews Cubist co-founders Fraser Brown and Riad Wahby about building security-focused developer tools for cross-chain Web3 development. Cubist received a Stellar Bridge Bounty grant and discusses why they integrated with Stellar.

Stellar Development Foundation announced updates to the Anchor Directory, adding search functionality, contact info, and filters for SEP standards to help wallets and anchors discover and connect with compatible partners on the network.

Soroban offers developers a compelling alternative to Ethereum and Solana through inclusive technology choices like WebAssembly and Rust, a greenfield ecosystem, global financial reach with diverse stablecoins, superior network reliability, and a streamlined developer experience.

The Stellar Community Fund published guidance on three best practices for successful SCF applications: demonstrate technical expertise with Soroban/Stellar, prove ecosystem impact, and define clear 3-month roadmaps with specific deliverables.

AnChain.AI, a Web3 security firm, integrated with Stellar to provide AI-powered risk management and fraud prevention tools for developers building on the network. The integration enables Stellar developers to access AnChain.AI's security solutions from the earliest phases of development.

Stellar Development Foundation announced plans to open-source the Stellar Disbursement Platform by Q3, enabling developers and organizations to build bulk payment and on/off-ramp solutions for humanitarian aid and financial inclusion use cases.

Soroban offers developers a compelling alternative to Ethereum and Solana through inclusive technology choices like WebAssembly and Rust, a greenfield ecosystem, real-world financial reach with diverse stablecoins, and reliable network performance backed by Stellar's mature infrastructure.