Stellar Ecosystem
News

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 Build Better on Stellar Smart Contract Challenge concluded with winners across tutorial and dApp categories, featuring projects like Entry•X (decentralized ticketing), DVILLA (sustainable e-commerce), and Soroban by Example. Winners received up to $13,000 USD and invitations to Meridian 2024, with next steps including SCF Kickstart and the Stellar Community Fund.

The Stellar Development Foundation and DEV announced the winners of the Build Better on Stellar: Smart Contract Challenge, with over $50,000 in prizes distributed across tutorial and dApp categories. Winners included projects like Soroban by Example, Entry X (decentralized ticketing), and DVILLA (sustainable e-commerce), with overall winners receiving $13,000 and all-expenses-paid trips to Meridian conference.

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.

Phoenix is a DeFi hub being built on Stellar's Soroban smart contract platform. The explainer video covers what Phoenix is and its role in the Stellar DeFi ecosystem.

Phoenix DeFi Hub has launched on Stellar's Soroban smart contract platform, starting with a decentralized exchange in May and planning an NFT marketplace and additional protocols. The platform aims to be a comprehensive DeFi solution leveraging Stellar's on/off-ramp infrastructure and stablecoin ecosystem.

This article explains smart contract wallets (smart wallets) and their advantages over traditional crypto wallets, including enhanced functionality, security features, and passkey support. It highlights how Stellar's Protocol 20 and 21 enable passkey-powered smart wallets to improve user onboarding and accessibility.

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.

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.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q2 2024 quarterly report, highlighting network growth to 8.4 million addresses, real-world asset supply exceeding $598 million, and significant progress in tokenization and Soroban adoption. The report showcases achievements including WisdomTree's expanded retail access, $7.8 million in enterprise investments, and $5 million in Stellar Community Fund awards to 107 projects.

Coinspect has published the results of their security audit of the Tricorn Bridge's Soroban integration, conducted in collaboration with Boosty Labs and the Stellar Development Foundation. The audit identified 3 high-risk, 6 medium-risk, and 1 low-risk vulnerabilities in the smart contract's Rust source code and Golang backend. All findings have been addressed by the development teams, enhancing Soroban security knowledge.

A comprehensive technical overview of the Stellar stack. Covers the three networks (Mainnet for production, Testnet for development, Futurenet for experimental features), Stellar Core's consensus protocol, Horizon API for blockchain interaction, Soroban RPC for smart contracts, and SDKs available in Go, Python, Java, and JavaScript.

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.

This article compares Stellar's State Archival solution with Solana's State Compression (Avocado), arguing that Stellar's approach is more efficient and scalable. The analysis highlights fundamental flaws in Solana's design including poor data availability guarantees, increased network congestion, and higher costs.

Tansu has received an SCF28 Activation award to build infrastructure that anchors Git commit hashes on Soroban. The system creates a decentralized record of code changes, helping maintainers verify project integrity and combat centralized platform risks without disrupting existing workflows.

The Stellar Development Foundation and DEV Community are launching the Build Better on Stellar: Smart Contract Challenge, running through August 18, offering a $50,000 prize pool and free trip to Meridian Conference for developers building dApps with Soroban smart contracts.

Stellar's newly launched Soroban smart contracts platform addresses key Web3 pain points including liquidity fragmentation, high transaction costs, and accessibility. With 80,000+ USDC on-ramps globally, an established user base of 8.4 million accounts, and a $100 million SDF commitment to builders, Stellar offers a mature, scalable foundation for DeFi development.

BlockEden.xyz unveiled their Soroban Indexer and GraphQL at Stellar's Meridian conference in Madrid from September 26–28, 2023. The article shares their pitch deck with 13 slides showcasing the innovations. Contact details and source link are provided.

Reflector hosted an AMA with Tomer Weller from the Stellar Development Foundation covering Stellar's scalability, latency optimization, DeFi composability on Soroban, and oracle use cases like prediction markets. The discussion highlighted upcoming performance improvements including parallel contract execution and networking optimizations planned for 2025.

Stellar Protocol 21 went live on June 18, 2024, introducing five Core Advancement Proposals including native secp256r1 verification for passkey support in smart contracts, alongside efficiency improvements for state archival and transaction costs.