DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Trustless Work presents escrow as a critical infrastructure layer for marketplace platforms, enabling non-custodial fund holding between buyers and sellers without requiring platforms to build custom payment systems. The article outlines how escrow solves the coordination problem in marketplaces and details the technical implementation using stablecoins and smart contracts.
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.
A technical deep-dive comparing authorization mechanisms across Ethereum, Stellar Soroban, and Solana blockchains, examining how each handles token approvals, fee sponsorship, and cross-contract calls through practical smart contract examples.
Dropzey is a tool built on the Stellar blockchain using Soroban smart contracts to simplify and automate airdrops, making them transparent and trustworthy. It verifies participant actions like social media follows and distributes tokens automatically. Backed by the Stellar Community Fund, Dropzey is currently running a presale for its $DROPZ token.
Stellar aims to become a top 10 DeFi chain by TVL, targeting $1.5 billion from current $48 million. The network has seen explosive growth since Soroban smart contracts launched in 2024, with daily contract interactions exceeding 400,000 and weekly fees hitting their highest level since 2021.
Soroban introduces smart contracts to the Stellar blockchain, leveraging WebAssembly and Rust for secure, efficient execution. Integrated natively into Stellar, it enables DeFi, tokenization, DAOs, and more without compromising speed or low costs. Launched on mainnet in 2023, it positions Stellar as a full-fledged dApp ecosystem.
The Stellar Dev Diaries series follows Freelii's journey from hackathon win to funded startup building on Stellar Network. Episode 1 features founders José Toscano and Joseph Anthony discussing their path to mainnet launch, including use of Soroban's PassKeys feature and Stellar Community Fund support.
This article introduces Stellar DeFi, highlighting its strengths in interoperability, scalability, and low-cost transactions. It covers key features like the Stellar Consensus Protocol, Soroban smart contracts, asset tokenization, and applications in cross-border payments and financial inclusion. Stellar is positioned as a leader in building scalable DeFi solutions for both retail and institutional users.
Stellar introduces Soroban, its WebAssembly-based smart contract platform built in Rust, enabling developers to create DeFi applications, tokenized assets, DAOs, and other decentralized applications while maintaining low costs and high security on the Stellar network.
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 composability in DeFi and blockchain development using a hot rod analogy, detailing how different protocols and smart contracts can integrate seamlessly on Stellar to create more powerful financial systems. It covers DeFi building blocks, composability benefits, TVL growth, and practical considerations for building composable projects on Stellar.
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.
PaltaLabs attended BUIDL HERE conference in Puerto Rico, delivering university talks on blockchain development and participating in panels on talent pipeline and workforce preparation. The team presented Soroswap Finance and DeFindex, marking a strategic commitment to developing blockchain talent and building community across Latin America through planned workshops with Stellar Chile ambassadors.
OpenZeppelin's security audit of the Stellar Contracts Library, a new set of smart contract components for Soroban, identified one high-severity issue, one medium-severity issue, and five low-severity issues across fungible token and pausable utility modules. All issues have been resolved through pull requests.
PaltaLabs won the Best Oracle-Based Smart Contract Award at the 2nd Reflector Dev Contest for Trustless Portfolio Manager, an automated DeFi portfolio rebalancing tool built on Soroban that combines Reflector price feeds, DeFindex vaults, and Soroswap AMM functionality.
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.
The Stellar Community Fund returns for its sixth iteration with a focus on Soroban smart contracts, introducing new focal points including the Kickstart bootcamp, SCF Build Awards (up to $150,000 in XLM grants), and delegate panels for expert mentorship.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q4 2024 report highlighting a transformative year with 18 billion network operations, $32 billion in payment volume, and significant ecosystem growth including 640% Soroban TVL expansion and Protocol 22 upgrade.
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.
Balanced released its Q4 2024 update, highlighting launches on Stellar, Solana, and Optimism, alongside BALN cross-chain deployment across multiple blockchains including Stellar. Key achievements include intent-based trades between Arbitrum and Sui, smart contract audits, and preparations for cross-chain liquidity and Savings Rate. The DAO reported $82k in fees, with ongoing governance and economic enshrinement progress.
A developer tackles a challenge to create the smallest invokable Soroban smart contract on Stellar mainnet, beating the previous 66-byte record by using an empty export name. The solution shrinks the WASM binary to 39 bytes including the required metadata section. Mainnet transaction hashes are provided for upload and invocation.
DIA has deployed its price oracle infrastructure on Stellar's Soroban testnet, enabling developers to build DeFi applications with real-time market data feeds. The deployment was supported by a Stellar Community Fund award and provides access to price feeds for over 2,500 cryptocurrency tokens.
A tutorial demonstrating how to build a Soroban smart contract that automates savings by fetching real-time XLM prices from Reflector Oracles and triggering conversions when price thresholds are met.
Runtime Verification details their process for building formal verification and fuzzing tools using the K Framework to enhance smart contract security. They highlight tools like Kontrol for Ethereum and Komet specifically for Soroban smart contracts on Stellar. The post aims to bridge the gap between developers and advanced security tooling.
This article explores how passkeys—a secure, user-friendly authentication method already adopted in Web2—are being integrated into Stellar's blockchain to improve user experience and drive adoption. Stellar gained a significant advantage by implementing native secp256r1 support in Protocol 21, enabling passkey functionality directly at the protocol level rather than through third-party solutions.
