Stellar Ecosystem
News

A two-day Istanbul residency brought 31 Stellar builders face-to-face with the Stellar Development Foundation team for direct feedback instead of waiting for scheduled calls. The key insight: early-stage teams accelerate when decision loops shrink from weeks to minutes through direct expert access.

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 Raven is an MCP server built by the Stellar Development Foundation that solves a core problem: AI assistants have stale or incorrect information about Stellar. By connecting to official docs, ecosystem data, and community research in one interface, Raven lets developers ask AI agents current, accurate Stellar questions, matching how many builders now learn new ecosystems.

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.

Tellus Cooperative opened a Blockchain Hub in Santiago with Stellar Development Foundation support. The hub serves as physical infrastructure for the Chilean Web3 community to collaborate and build on Stellar, underpinned by Tellus's cooperative model of horizontal decision-making and value distribution—a contrast to venture-driven startup culture.

A guide to alternative ways to succeed in the Stellar ecosystem beyond founding a startup. Whether you're a developer, designer, community organizer, or infrastructure builder, the ecosystem needs your skills. Discover five paths to impact without launching a company.

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.

Over 23 rounds since October 2023, Stellar Community Fund's Neural Quorum Governance has distributed $38M to over 500 projects. The open-source voting system combining layered neurons with quorum delegation evolved across three phases and now achieves 89% alignment with expert delegate panels.

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.

Stellar Wave 7 introduces an appeal process for rejected repository applications, cuts app loading times substantially on slower connections through frontend optimization, and improves the issue review bot to better assess CI failures. The update also includes 2.8x faster test transactions and unified support channels via a new status page.

Stellar Raven is an MCP server that aggregates Stellar documentation, tools, ecosystem data, and community intelligence into a single connection for AI agents. Created by @kalepail, it helps builders navigate the ecosystem without jumping between multiple sources.

Rise In and Stellar Philippines hosted Build on Stellar at Philippine Blockchain Week, drawing 127 developers for hands-on Soroban training and ecosystem education. Day 1 featured technical workshops and hackathon winner showcases; Day 2 brought together founders, enterprises, and developers for collaborative panel discussions. The event also launched the APAC Stellar Hackathon with $60,000 in prizes.

The Notorious Bug Digest #9 dissects three critical blockchain vulnerabilities: a rule selection downgrade in Stellar smart account authorization, a ZK circuit misconstraint that halts privacy protocols, and signed-integer bit-smuggling in perpetuals. Detailed code analysis and remediation guidance for developers.

Rise In and Stellar Philippines hosted the Build on Stellar bootcamp at Philippine Blockchain Week, drawing 127 developers for hands-on training on Stellar and Soroban smart contract development. The event showcased five hackathon winners and launched the APAC Stellar Hackathon with a $60,000 prize pool.

Runtime Verification achieved Milestone 2 on its SCF-funded WebAssembly debugger for Soroban: a formal-semantics-grounded execution tracer and testnet node. Milestone 3 (DAP server, VS Code and Cursor plugins) is underway, with completion expected in 3 weeks. The debugger enables step-through execution, breakpoint debugging, and memory inspection for Rust-compiled smart contracts.

Drips Wave 6 launches with smarter contributor dashboard defaults, improved issue review automation, repo application limits (5 per wave + KYC requirement), and performance improvements. The new dashboard surfaces relevant issues at launch, while the bot now catches CI/CD gaps and avoids stale pull requests.

Fajrin, a self-taught developer from South Kalimantan, led the first Stellar Ambassador gathering in his region and is now building Cyphras, a private payments wallet on Soroban, after winning Instawards funding through the Ambassador Program. His story illustrates how the Stellar ecosystem turns early-stage builders into real shipping products.

Istanbul Blockchain Week brought the Stellar community together through the Build on Stellar Hackathon and Sunset Party, drawing 80 builders to engage with the network's growing ecosystem and each other.

SDF published Stellar Skills, an AI-ready documentation hub designed to help AI agents understand Stellar-specific patterns, SDKs, and best practices. The site includes core skill areas for Soroban, wallets, assets, RPC, and community tools like Trustless Work escrow.

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 Protocol 26, called Yardstick, went live on mainnet May 6, 2026. The upgrade introduces Quorum Freeze for governed incident response, checked arithmetic to prevent crashes on overflow, precise TTL control for state management, and improved cryptographic operations for zero-knowledge proofs.

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.

Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation, argues that AI agents will disrupt the attention economy by eliminating the need for ad impressions. As agents handle tasks without experiencing ads, direct micropayments via blockchain protocols become the economic model that replaces behavioral targeting.