Stellar Ecosystem
News

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.

xycloo Labs built Soroban Insurance, a decentralized insurance protocol for Soroban smart contracts that uses Reflector oracle price feeds. The protocol allows users to purchase policies protecting against asset price movements over defined periods, with liquidity providers earning premiums while covering potential claims.

Stellar's Protocol 21 upgrade activated on June 18, 2024, introducing five Core Advancement Proposals (CAPs) that enable passkey support for smart contracts, improve state archival, and reduce transaction costs through VM optimization and module caching.

Veridise security analysts discovered a critical issue in Soroban's build-test-deploy process where the `createimport!` macro allows deployment of contracts with outdated or incorrect imported dependencies without requiring them to be listed as crate dependencies, potentially leading to broken contracts in production.

Stellar launched Soroban, a smart contract platform integrated into Protocol 20, addressing key blockchain challenges like transaction speed, security vulnerabilities, state bloat, and high costs while leveraging Stellar's extensive payment rail network for real-world DeFi applications.

Reflector launches a dev challenge (June 5-19) for Soroban contracts utilizing its oracle. Prizes: $2,500 USDC plus Meridian conference tickets. Open to developers worldwide ages 18+; teams welcome.

FxDAO's peg system for synthetic currencies on Stellar uses XLM collateral and arbitrage incentives similar to the gold standard, not algorithmic stablecoins. It features controlled issuance, redemption, and liquidations to maintain stability and health. The protocol ensures debt cannot exceed collateral value, enforced by smart contracts.

This article introduces Stellar and its Soroban smart contract platform to Polkadot users, highlighting integration via the Spacewalk bridge by Pendulum. It covers asset transfers for Stellar's stablecoins, use cases in DeFi and payments, and provides a getting started guide. The synergy aims to enhance cross-chain financial inclusion and innovation.

Stellar launches Soroban smart contracts platform, enabling a new DeFi ecosystem on the network. Built with Rust and WebAssembly for developer familiarity, Soroban maintains Stellar's focus on low costs, scalability, and financial inclusion while protocols like Soroswap and XycLoans already deploy on mainnet.

FxDAO shares its Q1 2024 update, highlighting the completion of a smart contract audit by Runtime Verification and adaptations to Soroban platform changes on Stellar. Despite challenges like limit downgrades requiring refactors, the team resolved issues to fit current network limits. They are preparing for mainnet launch with vaults for synthetic USD, EUR, and GBP, alongside plans for a custom oracle.

Draper University and the Stellar Development Foundation announced two new programs—the Astro Hacker House and Embark Accelerator—to support up to 80 startups building on Stellar and Soroban over the next two years, with a focus on AI integration and smart contract development.

Stellar Protocol 21 activated on Mainnet on June 18, 2024, introducing five Core Advancement Proposals (CAPs) that add passkey signing support, improve state archival, and reduce smart contract transaction costs. Developers and operators must upgrade their Stellar-related software and re-upload existing Wasms to benefit from the new cost model.

The Defiant published an explainer video on Stellar's Soroban smart contracts platform, which expands the network beyond its original focus on low-cost payments to enable decentralized applications while maintaining support for underbanked regions.

A Stellar Development Foundation leader reflects on their five-year tenure, highlighting SDF's strategic focus on building a viable ecosystem through payments infrastructure, on/off-ramps, and real-world assets. The post celebrates Stellar's growth metrics and the recent launch of Soroban smart contracts as the next phase of ecosystem expansion.

The Stellar Development Foundation released its Q1 2024 quarterly report highlighting major ecosystem achievements including the launch of smart contracts on Stellar, $3.2M in Stellar Community Fund awards, the introduction of the Soroban Audit Bank for security, and significant growth metrics including 8M+ network accounts and $1.6B in real world asset payment volume.

The development team shares updates from April 26, 2024, including bug fixes, new UI testing for the Custom Risk Framework, and live Governance and Tokenomics V2 dashboards. Key advancements feature Stellar Soroban nodes deployment, internal client readiness, and API support for circuit generators. Additional improvements cover data pipelines, price oracles for Optimism tokens, and Ethereum/NEAR analytics.

Script3 founder Markus Paulson-Luna discusses Blend Capital, a decentralized lending protocol on Stellar that lets users, DAOs, and institutions create customizable lending pools. The interview covers Blend's architecture, insurance mechanisms, and integration with Beans.