Stellar Ecosystem
News

Stellar's Q1 2026 report shows major milestones: RWAs crossed $2B (2.5x growth), payment volume hit $5.5B all-time high, and the developer ecosystem grew 86% YoY to 4,400+ developers. Major institutions including U.S. Bank, Amundi, and Société Générale are deploying on the network.

Stellar's Soroban smart contract runtime features a composable authorization model that decouples authorization from fee payment, enabling sponsored transactions, multi-party swaps, and programmable accounts through detachable auth entries and flexible verification logic.

Soundness deployed the only post-quantum signature migration strategy that scores YES on all four properties in Coinbase's Independent Advisory Board report. The approach uses zero-knowledge proofs of seed knowledge to enable quantum-safe wallets without address changes, asset migration, or hard forks.

OpenZeppelin releases Contracts CLI, a command-line tool for generating smart contracts across Solidity, Cairo, Stellar, and other ecosystems. The CLI powers contract generation for developers and AI agents, with zero setup required via npx.

Stellar Wave 4 launches April 22 with major updates: per-repo points budgets to prevent single repositories from dominating rewards, sunsetting the public leaderboard to refocus on contribution quality over rankings, and welcoming projects from the Codigo Alebrije hackathon.

Alchemy now supports Stellar with JSON-RPC 2.0 endpoints and WebSocket support, enabling developers to query the network and build production applications using the js-stellar-sdk.

HTTP 402 Payment Required is enabling machine-to-machine payments at scale. Stellar's fast, cheap settlement layer is positioned as the ideal backbone for agentic AI systems to transact autonomously through x402 and MPP protocols.

Stellar Hacks Agents hackathon runs until April 13th. This guide covers 8 essential tips for building agentic AI projects on Stellar, from validating your idea and creating demo videos to setting up USDC trustlines and testing payment flows.

x402 and MPP agentic payment protocols enable micropayments for any web resource using Stellar's infrastructure, unlocking new revenue models for AI agents and humans across APIs, data feeds, content, and services without subscription friction.

Yardstick (Protocol 26) upgrade guide for the Stellar network with key dates, preparation steps for SDK users and infrastructure operators, and links to all relevant releases.

SCF #41 awarded 34 projects across three tracks (Open, Integration, RFP) with a total of $3,941,744 worth of XLM, the highest awarded round to date. The round marked the first under SCF 7.0's restructured framework and achieved perfect alignment between community voting and delegate panel decisions.

Quantum computing progress has accelerated the timeline for cryptographic threats to blockchain. Research shows qubit requirements to break elliptic curve cryptography fell 44%, Google targets 2029 for quantum-safe systems, and major chains face a race condition during migration that leaves zero margin for error.

Space and Time released a guide for using SXT Studio to query, visualize, and analyze Stellar Network data. The tool supports SQL and natural language queries, dashboards, and custom explorer building for tracking wallets, transactions, and smart contracts.

Drips Wave 2 concluded with significant improvements to contributor diversity and reward fairness. Wave 3 launches March 23rd with new features including real-time Sybil defenses, AI-assisted workflows, and stricter contribution limits to prevent farming.

A technical deep-dive into Zero-Knowledge Proofs as a solution for blockchain scalability and privacy, featuring Noir DSL for circuit design and Soroban integration on Stellar. The author demonstrates production-ready ZK implementation through Cosmic Coder, a game that validates player progress on-chain using cryptographic proofs.

A comprehensive technical exploration of privacy-preserving trading mechanisms on Stellar, comparing zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and trusted execution environments. The authors built working prototypes using MPC and TEE approaches, with TEEs emerging as the most practical solution for production systems.

Drips is launching Stellar Wave 2 on February 19th with major improvements including application quotas, post-contribution surveys, language filtering, org profiles, Discord linking, and enhanced spam protection.

Stellar Dev Skill is a new open-source tool that integrates with AI coding agents (Claude, OpenCode, Codex) to provide up-to-date Stellar development guidance, covering Soroban contracts, SDKs, APIs, wallets, security, and DeFi ecosystem resources.

Stellar's Protocol X-Ray upgrade (January 2026) introduces zero-knowledge proof verification capabilities enabling developers to build privacy-preserving applications while maintaining ledger transparency. The article demonstrates how association sets and view keys allow private transactions within compliance frameworks, combining financial privacy with regulatory oversight.