DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Stellar activated Protocol 20, launching its Soroban smart contracts platform in a phased rollout. The upgrade enables Ethereum-style programmability on the payments network, with 160+ projects already building on testnet preparing for mainnet deployment.
Stellar network validators voted to upgrade Mainnet to Protocol 20 on Feb. 20, enabling Soroban smart contracts with a phased rollout approach. The upgrade de…
Stellar Mainnet upgraded to Protocol 20 on February 20, enabling smart contract functionality through Soroban. This guide provides developers and businesses w…
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q4 2023 quarterly report highlighting major ecosystem achievements including Protocol 20 support, Soroban mainnet rollout, $4M in SCF funding to 88 projects, and over $2M in humanitarian aid disbursed via the Stellar Disbursement Platform.
Stellar network validators postponed the Protocol 20 upgrade vote due to a bug discovered in Stellar Core v20.1.0. The SDF has outlined a new timeline with a bug fix release on February 2, testnet reset on February 6, and a target Protocol 20 upgrade vote on February 20.
The Stellar Development Foundation organized the Workshop on Heterogeneous Trust in Distributed Systems (HTDS) in October, bringing together 30 researchers to explore consensus mechanisms where validators independently choose which peers to trust—a key feature of Stellar and other networks.
The Stellar Development Foundation disclosed a bug in Stellar Core v20.1.0 affecting fee-bumped Soroban transactions, where refunds are incorrectly sent to the sponsored account instead of the sponsor. SDF decided to proceed with the Protocol 20 upgrade vote on January 30 as planned, citing low risk during early Soroban phases and the availability of mitigation best practices.
An educational deep-dive into Stellar's Proof-of-Agreement (PoA) consensus algorithm, explaining how it differs from Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake through relatable examples of quorums, slices, and topens.
Blend, a permissionless on-chain lending protocol, has launched on Stellar Testnet. Users can now test lending, borrowing, and backstopping features using browser wallets like Freighter. The protocol offers high capital efficiency, flexible pools, and risk mitigations for the Stellar DeFi ecosystem.
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.
Stellar Development Foundation announced Protocol 20 upgrade with Soroban smart contracts, scheduled for January 30 validator vote on Mainnet. The network will roll out smart contract functionality in three phased stages to ensure stability and performance.
This article explains asset tokenization on Stellar, covering what it is, who can tokenize assets, key benefits like operational efficiency and transparency, and the technical process for creating digital representations of real-world assets on the network.
The Stellar Community Fund has distributed over $10M in XLM to 130+ projects across 10 review rounds and is scaling up funding by five times. The article provides eight key guidelines for submitting successful SCF proposals, emphasizing ecosystem impact, clear deliverables, and deep Stellar/Soroban integration.
RPCiege: Siege 5, Space Continuum launches December 4th with four Soroban smart contract challenges focused on state archival. Players can earn NFT cards and XLM rewards (up to 500 XLM for first place on each skirmish).
The Stellar Development Foundation announced the winners of Sorobanathon: Road to Mainnet, a month-long virtual hackathon held September-October 2023. Four projects were awarded: Cowchain Farm (gaming), Divify (expense management), Kwickbit & Paltalabs (compliance), and Soro-Shark (tokenization), with SDF planning additional hackathons for 2024.
Stellar's Protocol 20 upgrade, which enables Soroban smart contracts on Mainnet, is approaching a validator vote. The upgrade implements 12 Core Advancement Proposals and unlocks new possibilities for developers while maintaining Stellar's existing capabilities.
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 highlights five outstanding submissions from the Sorobounty Spectacular program, a content bounty initiative that encouraged developers to build Soroban dapps with educational tutorials. Featured projects include a regulated assets dapp, a snooker game, a farming game, a payment streaming app, and a Bitcoin price oracle.
Stellar is launching Soroban, a smart-contract platform built with Rust and WebAssembly, to compete with Ethereum and other chains. The upgrade, expected by year-end, includes a $100M adoption fund and partnership with Certora for security verification.
Decentralife is a new interview series from the Stellar Development Foundation profiling builders in the blockchain ecosystem. The first feature is Neema Adam, a front-end engineer in Tanzania working on ClickPesa (cross-border payments infrastructure) and Flexbeats (a platform for African music producers to sell beats globally).
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.
Soroban's fee structure uses granular resource metering to price compute, memory, and storage independently, enabling more efficient block utilization and lower validator costs than traditional gas-based systems like Ethereum's.
The Stellar Development Foundation outlines seven current and upcoming developer programs for Soroban, ranging from content bounties and hackathons to educational challenges and coding puzzles, with awards up to $150,000 XLM for builders creating end-to-end products.
This article explains the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a Proof-of-Agreement mechanism that enables Stellar to achieve fast, energy-efficient consensus without mining. It compares SCP to other consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake, and details how Stellar's transparent, node-based validation process works.
An educational overview of blockchain fundamentals, explaining how distributed ledgers work, their advantages over centralized databases, and comparisons of major blockchain platforms including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Stellar.
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 released its Q2 2023 report highlighting major progress on Soroban smart contracts, Anchor Platform support for deposits/withdrawals, Hubble analytics, and ecosystem growth including Franklin Templeton's $270M fund and MoneyGram's 1-year anniversary on Stellar.