DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Stellar-core 22.1 will drop SQL support for ledger state and transaction history tables. The release introduces a new high-throughput HTTP query server with the `getledgerentryraw` endpoint as the replacement for direct SQL access.
The Stellar Development Foundation has achieved a 9x speedup in Horizon reingestion by leveraging the Composable Data Platform (CDP) with precomputed ledger metadata, reducing full history reingestion from approximately 66 days to 7 days.
The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q3 2024 report highlighting major ecosystem milestones including 9 million network addresses, $5M+ in Enterprise and Matching Fund investments, and the launch of Stellar Community Fund 6.0. Key achievements include Franklin Templeton's Benji platform reaching $450M in supply, Protocol 22 development nearing completion, and expanded ecosystem integrations with Dune and DefiLlama.
Protocol 22 is now live on Stellar Mainnet. This guide provides developers and businesses with upgrade instructions, key dates, release links for all Stellar infrastructure and SDKs, and important changes including the Soroban RPC rebrand to Stellar RPC and upcoming Horizon transaction meta defaults changes.
CoinFabrik shares insights from three major crypto conferences: Permissionless III highlighted Web3 marketing's growing importance, Meridian 2024 showcased Scout's positive reception in the Stellar ecosystem, and Avalanche Summit LATAM featured CyScout, their new CodeQL-based security tool for Solidity developers.
A developer shares how they deployed their Stellar-based dApp 'Tansu' on IPFS using Storacha for storage and xlm.sh as a Stellar-aware gateway. The tutorial covers IPFS basics, uploading files, handling CSP issues with Soroban RPC, and leveraging Stellar's manage data operations for CID resolution. This enhances decentralization while integrating seamlessly with Stellar and Soroban ecosystems.
Reflector has launched its 2nd developer contest with a 120,000 xRF prize pool across multiple categories including oracle-based smart contracts, subscription apps, and creative implementations. The contest also includes separate prizes for content creators and runs from October 16 to December 15, 2024.
Dfns ships Givre, an optimized FROST threshold signature library for distributed cryptographic systems. The open-source implementation outperforms existing Rust threshold EdDSA implementations and supports Bitcoin BIP340, Stellar, Soroban, Solana, and Tezos. Now maintained by Lockness under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust.
Chartui is a new customizable trading client designed specifically for the Stellar Decentralized Exchange (DEX). It offers real-time prices, charts, order books, trades, multi-pair monitoring, and multi-account management. Traders can personalize layouts, widgets, and analysis tools to enhance their Stellar DeFi experience.
Tansu integrates stellar.expert's contract validation mechanism to ensure its on-chain contract matches the source code repository. This uses GitHub actions and SLSA attestations for supply-chain security. The feature verifies contract provenance on the Stellar blockchain explorer.
Axelar announced its Mobius Development Stack, a new interoperability platform enabling permissionless cross-chain connections at scale. The Interchain Amplifier lets developers spin up connections to any blockchain—including Stellar—using AXL-incentivized validators, while the Interchain Token Service eliminates bridge fragmentation for cross-chain tokens.
The Stellar Development Foundation has launched an all-new Stellar Lab, a modernized web-based toolkit for developers to create accounts, test transactions, explore RPC methods and Horizon endpoints, and interact with the Stellar network. The redesigned interface includes mobile optimization, XDR-to-JSON conversion support, and the ability to save and share API requests.
Stellar Development Foundation hosted a blockchain workshop on decentralized finance and smart contracts at Universidad San Sebastián in Santiago. Co-organized with PaltaLabs and regional community initiatives including Tellus Cooperative and Campus on Chain, the event covered Soroban's unique features and demonstrated practical smart contract creation and real-world DeFi use cases.
Mercury has released Retroshades, a smart contract indexing technology designed specifically for Soroban-supporting chains. Retroshades allows developers to build custom indexers in minutes by defining data structures directly within smart contracts, eliminating the need to learn new technologies or manage complex infrastructure.
Komet is a new tool from Runtime Verification for property testing and formal verification of Soroban smart contracts on the Stellar blockchain. It supports fuzzing and symbolic execution, integrating seamlessly with Rust for enhanced contract security. The article provides installation steps and a detailed case study testing a simple 'adder' contract.
Tansu, a Soroban-based versioning dApp, launches v1 on Stellar testnet, allowing project registration and on-chain Git history tracking. It completes SCF28 activation award deliverables, including smart contracts with Soroban Domains support and open-source tooling. The team thanks the Stellar community and eyes a Build award next.
This article explores the evolution of wallets from ancient times to modern smart contract wallets, highlighting how Stellar's infrastructure enables user-friendly, secure smart wallets with features like gasless transactions, passkey authentication, and account abstraction.
Technical comparison of three smart contract languages from someone who's shipped on all three. Solidity dominates by ecosystem size but carries well-known vulnerability classes. Soroban brings Rust's memory safety to Stellar with built-in resource metering. Plutus offers formal verification through functional programming but demands significant learning. Practical analysis of trade-offs for enterprise projects.
The Stellar Development Foundation introduced Galexie, the first component of the Composable Data Platform, a lightweight application that extracts and stores Stellar ledger data in cloud-based data lakes. Galexie decouples data extraction from transformation, enabling tools like Horizon and Hubble to access precomputed transaction metadata more efficiently than relying on Captive Core.
xyclooLabs announces new community indexes and dashboards functionality for Mercury, their data platform for Stellar developers. The update includes improvements to the zephyr-sdk with DashboardBuilder, backend infrastructure for creating and discovering indexes/dashboards, and a community section in the Mercury webapp.
The Stellar Development Foundation introduces the Composable Data Platform (CDP), a new open-source architecture that decentralizes data access on Stellar by breaking down monolithic tools like Horizon and Hubble into modular, configurable components. CDP enables developers to customize their data consumption patterns and infrastructure based on specific application needs.
Paltalabs led a developer workshop at ETHChile 2024 teaching Soroban smart contracts and Soroswap AMM mechanics. The session covered Stellar's cross-border payment design, contract fundamentals, liquidity pooling, and asset swaps for Latin American builders.
Floripa Web3 event in Florianópolis on August 9, 2024 featured Nearx experts Lucas Bispo de Oliveira and Caio Mattos discussing Rust, Soroban SDK, and the free Stellar Bootcamp program for blockchain developers.
Validation Cloud announced support for Stellar Horizon, offering high-performance Node API infrastructure with archive node data access. The service enables developers to build wallets, DEXs, and other applications on Stellar with improved performance and historical data querying capabilities.
A technical tutorial on building a custom indexer and API for the YieldBlox blend pool using Mercury and Zephyr. The guide covers setting up a Rust-based indexer to track borrow, repay, and collateral actions on Stellar, with real-time data retrieval through a custom API.
Tansu deployed its Soroban smart contract to testnet with event handling infrastructure now live. The governance platform released a Python library on PyPI. Upcoming milestones: dApp proof-of-concept, FastAPI backend, and continuous contract deployment.
Rob Durst announces Digicus, a visual block-based IDE for Soroban smart contract development that aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers. The tool allows developers to visualize, understand, and edit Soroban contracts without requiring deep Rust expertise.
Stellar introduces State Archival, a protocol solution to blockchain state bloat that archives unused ledger entries while maintaining security through Merkle proofs stored in History Archives. This approach enables Stellar to maintain low validator costs, high throughput, and scalability without requiring expensive hardware.
