DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
Stellar's smart contract platform Soroban differs from EVM in authorization, storage with TTL expiry, cross-contract calls, and asset handling. Security audits must check both the application logic and these platform-specific behaviors. Certora outlines the key audit considerations for Soroban builders.
OpenZeppelin and T-REX Network released ONCHAINID V3, a modular smart account for regulated assets. The architecture supports flexible signing methods, programmable recovery, and cross-chain identity while keeping compliance rules under issuer control. Stellar support is planned.
Soroban Rust SDK v28 introduces breaking changes that simplify contract data management. Contracts can now add optional fields or remove fields entirely without breaking stored data via CAP-86. New features include spec shaking v2 to reduce Wasm bloat for large contract imports, sparse event publishing to lower on-chain payloads, and executable references for coordinated fleet upgrades.
Stellar Pro Hackathon in Istanbul brought together 153 builders across Genesis and Scale tracks, producing 85 projects in 36 hours. Winning projects ranged from DeFi-integrated wallets to health-tourism escrow infrastructure to Anchor reliability tools, showing the breadth of Stellar-powered applications builders can create.
OpenZeppelin's confidential token contract for Stellar addresses a core fintech challenge: how to keep transaction amounts private while preserving the issuer's operational controls, regulatory visibility, and compliance oversight. The design balances confidentiality with issuer-managed architecture.
Stellar Community Fund announces SCF #45 results: 40 projects awarded approximately $4.04M XLM across Open, Integration, and RFP tracks. The cohort spans confidential-finance infrastructure, real-world-asset tokenization, cross-border payment rails, and agentic-payment tooling, reflecting the Stellar builder community's deepening depth and technical ambition.
Trustless Work V2 arrives in beta on Stellar Testnet. The major upgrade makes escrow configurable: quorum approvals, multi-address roles, batch operations, observers, and flexible milestones let builders adapt the trust model to grants, marketplaces, agencies, and autonomous systems. V1 remains production on Mainnet with no changes. V2 SDKs include React and new JavaScript/TypeScript framework-agnostic options.
Normal rebuilt its core infrastructure over summer to support 100k+ users. Portfolio loading improved 61x (22 seconds to 0.36 seconds), test coverage jumped from zero to 566 automated tests, and unauthenticated API routes dropped from 18 to zero. Cross-chain swaps now require one signature instead of up to four.
LumosCore introduced a Curated Assets program to help Stellar users identify authentic tokens. The $250 listing fee (refunded if declined) covers manual review of asset verification, metadata completeness, trading liquidity, and project presence. Approved tokens receive a verification mark and prominent placement.
Boundless, a Stellar blockchain platform for bounties and hackathons, hosts multiple opportunities during Southeast Blockchain & Games Week (September 16-26): a Pollar payments SDK integration hackathon ($500 prize pool), Stellar Vietnam mid-autumn festival bounties ($1,000), and an AMA on Stellar Community Fund grants. Combined prize pool: $1,700 USDC.
Stellar's Raven MCP server connects AI agents to official documentation, ecosystem data, and live network information. Developers using Claude, Codex, Cursor, or VS Code can query Soroban standards and builder resources directly from their IDE after a single authentication.
Merkl, the onchain distribution infrastructure used by Circle and Coinbase, powered major summer launches: Robinhood Earn (rate management), Coinbase Tokenized Stocks (cashback on Base), and 1inch Aqua (volume rewards). Merkl also expanded to three new chains—Pharos, Kaia, and Robinhood Chain—and made its Stellar debut with Templar and Upshift vaults live.
SODA token is now tradeable on XLM Domains, a decentralized identity and DeFi platform on Stellar. The integration enables SODA holders to trade, manage positions, and access SODAX execution across 20+ networks from Stellar's native payment address system.
SODAX integrates with XLM Domains to let MetaMask users control a Stellar smart wallet and trade domains, NFTs, and tokens without setting up a new wallet. The integration includes sponsored account activation, solving a key cross-network funding problem that benefits all future Stellar integrators.
Certora compared three Soroban security tools—Sunbeam (formal verifier), Komet (hybrid fuzzing/proving), and cargo-fuzz—on detecting bugs and proving correctness. Fuzzing found obvious failures quickly but missed rare edge cases. Sunbeam detected all bugs and proved correct code was mathematically sound.
At Tellus Cooperative's Builder Night, a 30-minute hackathon tested rapid shipping through clear infrastructure and social momentum. Builders claimed pizzas with a PIZZA token via Sozu wallets on Stellar, proving practical merchant integration and low barrier to entry.
Stellar Private Payments (SPP), built by Nethermind, launches in developer preview on testnet. The privacy protocol lets users deposit assets into a shared pool and make private transfers while keeping counterparties and amounts private. It includes compliance tools—association set providers for access control, global view keys for auditors, and selective disclosure—enabling privacy alongside regulatory requirements.
Stellar's São Paulo Builder Summit brought 218 developers from 10+ countries together for eight days of focused work across three lanes: privacy, payment ramps, and agentic tooling. The event produced 19 completed projects and 50+ bounty submissions.
Stellar InstAwards program funds 10 Turkish builders with $50k total. Projects span remittance infrastructure, P2P trading, privacy solutions, developer tools, DeFi vaults, micropayments, and AI-assisted workflows, demonstrating diverse builder ecosystem on Stellar and Soroban.
A Trustless Work engineer took second place at Stellar Summit for a testnet POC combining Confidential Tokens with escrow infrastructure. Green Road emerged as a personal learning project exploring privacy-preserving payment mechanics — specifically, what balances can hide versus what relationships remain visible. The work surfaces important trade-offs around selective disclosure and transaction correlation that future privacy-escrow designs must address.
Trustless Work joins SCF's official Integration List, becoming an official building block for ecosystem teams.
Protocol 28 (Adapter) upgrades the Stellar network with three builder-focused improvements: faster consensus under load via CAP-83, atomic contract fleet upgrades through shared code references (CAP-85), and safer contract data migration with sparse host functions (CAP-86). Testnet upgrade August 27, mainnet vote September 16.
Fuul's July update removes manual reward claiming, adds Stripe integration to reward card payments alongside on-chain actions, and opens support for Monad and Stellar wallets through Freighter and Lobstr.
XOXNO's team hit Soroban memory limits while scaling complex DeFi strategies. Their debugging journey identified that cross-contract calls were consuming full 1 MB of linear memory per call—a transient cost never credited back. A protocol-level fix refunding VM memory at teardown is coming in an upgrade; meanwhile, Reflector's compile flag optimization provides immediate relief, unlocking more complex on-chain flows for the ecosystem.
Trexure and Velo, two finalists from the APAC Stellar Hackathon, were interviewed on Rise In's Builder Spotlight. The conversation covered building through hackathon phases, how mentorship and ecosystem support from Rise In and Stellar Philippines shaped their work, and the harder question: what does "after the hackathon" mean when you plan to keep shipping.
Para launches Stellar support for embedded wallets, enabling fintech teams to build custom wallet experiences directly into their apps. Use cases include remittances, stablecoin payouts, and cross-border payments on Stellar's purpose-built payments network with sub-second settlement and sub-cent fees.
