Stellar Ecosystem
News

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.

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.