DeFi, payments, tokenization, Soroban, governance, and project launches — curated daily from publications, project blogs, and community channels across the Stellar blockchain ecosystem.
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.
Buidlers Bolivia launches a nationwide university tour and seven-day hackathon to introduce students and developers to Stellar. The initiative connects Bolivia's rapid stablecoin adoption, which grew 630% in regulated channels in 2025, to a developer pipeline with mentorship from ecosystem projects including Trustless Work and Vaquita.
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.
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.
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'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.
Anke Liu, who has run the Stellar Community Fund since 2020, launches a Substack on governance in practice. Drawing from six years managing $38M+ in awards, she'll write about how voting mechanisms and capital allocation actually work—not how they're designed, but what happens when real money and incentives show up.
Stellar's curriculum becomes the first official blockchain program at VKU in Da Nang. Rise In and the university designed a structured three-phase course: foundations in blockchain and Stellar Core, hands-on building with Stellar's tools, and final demo day with 100+ students deploying dApps on Testnet.
The Stellar Development Foundation launched the Stellar Ambassador Program, a global initiative with four progression tiers: Explorer (onboarding), Contributor (workshops and mentoring), Builder (project deployment), and Ecosystem Leader (regional initiatives). The program connects local chapters to the Stellar Community Fund pipeline, offering up to $150K in XLM for projects moving from concept to mainnet.
On July 18, the largest Stellar hackathon ever held in APAC wrapped three simultaneous demo days across Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Vietnam's event drew 150+ attendees evaluating 75 project submissions, Indonesia's Yogyakarta attracted 400+ participants with 86 submissions, and the Philippines ran an eight-hour marathon with 56 live pitches at GCash. The program converted a hackathon into a builder pipeline: teams spent weeks shipping functional, user-facing financial applications addressing real payment and access problems in Southeast Asia. Finalists advance to the APAC Grand Finale on July 31, competing across Local Finance & Real World Access, DeFi & Ecosystem Composability, and Payments & Consumer Applications tracks for $60K in prizes.
Turkish-language developer handbook organizing Stellar resources across learning pathways. Covers journey to mastery program, starter projects (payment splitter, balance checker, wallet connect), smart contracts with Soroban, DApp development, oracles, privacy/ZK, and funding via SCF and InstAwards.
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.
A step-by-step guide to depositing assets into Sentora's vaults on the Stellar DeFi Hub. Covers wallet connection, vault selection, deposit confirmation, and position tracking for XLM, USDC, and PYUSD, with details on reward structures and early withdrawal consequences.
SDF publishes a practical guide to monitoring assets and positions on Stellar using Hypernative. Covers threat modeling, monitoring plan development, and two detailed examples: setting up large XLM transfer alerts and tracking Blend pool utilization thresholds.
SDF publishes a guide to onchain monitoring as essential operational practice for smart contract builders. Using threat modeling to identify what to watch, monitoring platforms keep protocols safe in production.
COZ supported StarBase Connect Day in Santos, Brazil, introducing Stellar to more than 140 students and regional innovators through an Ideathon. The event created a foundation for continued developer engagement in Baixada Santista, with a professional hackathon extending momentum into the region's tech community.
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.
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.
Alula publishes a technical guide to RWA-backed borrowing costs on Stellar, breaking down the full cost structure: kinked interest rates, reactive modifiers tied to pool utilization, one-time operation fees, and network transaction costs. Borrowing capacity is enforced atomically, and settlement is near-instant.
Vietnam is rapidly shifting from an emerging opportunity into a builder-driven market attracting global foundations. At DAVAS 2026, regulatory openness around fintech and blockchain, government alignment on innovation, and strong developer talent converged. Stellar and Rise In show how direct founder support and mentorship create sustainable ecosystem outcomes rather than pursuing growth metrics.
Stellar Passport created nearly 200 new wallets at Istanbul's post-hackathon event, demonstrating how experiential marketing drives real ecosystem onboarding. A single QR scan gives users a passkey-secured wallet with instant access.
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.
Stellar Security Portal redesigned for June 2026 with threaded comments on vulnerability reports, community ratings for protocols and auditors, and major performance improvements. Contributor access expanded beyond the Pilot tier, allowing SCF members and navigators to add and edit audits. The portal now tracks nearly 700 vulnerabilities ecosystem-wide.
Tellus Cooperative hosted Stellar Academy in Temuco, Chile, bringing 50+ participants together for hands-on smart contract training. The event centered on Stellar Passport, a Web3 identity tool that participants configured in real-time, demonstrating accessible onboarding for the Stellar ecosystem.
A 12-week ambassador program at iDEAUFRO in southern Chile introduces students from diverse backgrounds to Stellar blockchain and Web3 development. The program uses Stellar Passport for identity management and project tracking, emphasizing that blockchain extends far beyond cryptocurrency to enable open, accessible global finance.
This article explains the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) and its innovative use of quorum slices and Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) to achieve decentralized consensus. It details how SCP enables Stellar to operate with high security, low costs, and high performance while promoting organic network growth through open participation.
