Stellar Weekly Roundup — week of Jul 3, 2026

Protocol 27, codenamed Zipper, went live on Stellar mainnet on July 9, shipping auth delegation, bundled signature entries, and replay protection. That same day, Alchemy joined Stellar's tier-1 validator set, participating directly in SCP consensus. The UNDP and SDF extended their partnership to make blockchain-based digital payments a permanent UNDP capability through 2027, scaling results from five country pilots.

Protocol 27 and Network Infrastructure

Protocol 27 activated on Stellar mainnet July 9. The Zipper upgrade ships auth delegation as a first-class smart account feature, combines all signer auth into one entry per transaction, simplifies simulation, and prevents signature replay.

CAP-711 adds built-in delegation support for modular custom accounts. CAP-712 fixes a signature vulnerability: the standard authorization pre-image did not include the signer's address, creating a replay risk when private keys are shared across accounts during simultaneous signer rotation. Both CAPs were discussed at the July 8 Stellar Developers Meeting.

Alchemy now participates directly in SCP consensus as a tier-1 validator, adding to its existing Stellar RPC and read support. At Thursday's developer meeting, @0xkaancar presented CAP-0084 and CAP-0085 for community review.

Institutional Activity

The UNDP and SDF extended their partnership through 2027, converting five country pilots into standing UNDP operational infrastructure. Pilots across Haiti, Kenya, Syria, Guatemala, and The Gambia cut transaction costs from 10% to 2% and achieved 100% reliability in low-connectivity settings.

M1X Global raised $8.5 million led by Paradigm to scale USDM1, a U.S. Treasury-backed sovereign bond issued natively on a public blockchain by the Republic of the Marshall Islands. DFNS provides wallet and banking infrastructure; USDM1 is integrated into institutional collateral workflows at Bank of America, Citadel Securities, and Virtu Financial and funds quarterly UBI payments to Marshall Islands citizens. DFNS detailed the setup across Stellar, Canton, and Solana.

STBL published Q2 milestones: USST reached 5 million tokens minted on Stellar, and Hashlock and Cyfrin completed security audits. OpenZeppelin and T-REX Network announced a partnership to deliver ERC-3643 as an audited library component and extend T-REX Protocol to non-EVM networks, with a Stellar-native implementation already complete.

Consumer Wallets

Normal Finance expanded its non-custodial wallet to support Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana alongside XLM in a single app. Stellar remains the core settlement layer; USDC deposits earn yield via Blend and DeFindex.

MoneyGram is now live inside Normal Finance as a cash on/off-ramp, covering 500,000+ locations across 200+ countries. Users deposit cash and receive cryptocurrency directly, or reverse the flow to cash out.

Developer Infrastructure

OpenZeppelin published step-by-step guides for running its Relayer Service in teams' own AWS and GCP environments, covering compute, state management, key security, fee bumping, and RPC failover.

Stellar Raven, an MCP server built by @kalepail, aggregates Stellar documentation, tools, and community intelligence into a single connection for AI agents and builders. The companion Stellar Skills directory curates context files teaching agents about Stellar contracts, SDKs, and tooling. Mercury (Xycloo Labs) launched as a paid, production-ready indexing service after open testing, covering Soroban events, webhooks, retroshades, and RPC access.

DeFi

DeFindex's APY Stabilizer received a completed audit from Rvinci Security. The two-week engagement, concluding June 2026, covered role-based access controls, fee bounds, accounting invariants, and cross-contract interaction security across two Soroban contracts. All findings were addressed or acknowledged. DeFindex ranks in the top 10 DeFi protocols on Stellar by TVL.

The July 2026 SCF Demo Day featured 75 awarded projects live on Stellar. Highlighted presentations included Inference, a formal verification language, and Lumen Loop, an ecosystem content aggregator and project directory. The SCF has awarded $7.7 million across 75+ projects in 2026.

Lightning Round

• Open Standard's OUSD, backed by 140+ companies including Stripe, Visa, and BlackRock, is launching on Stellar, Solana, Base, and Polygon, splitting reserve interest with distribution partners rather than concentrating it at the issuer.
• ArcusX recorded its first transaction on Stellar mainnet, demonstrating the end-to-end task-based payment workflow via Soroban.
• Untangled Finance described OctoPos, its multi-chain DeFi position and risk monitoring API, in a July interview, including real-time monitoring built after the February Blend Oracle exploit.
• The SCF updated Build Award guidelines: teams that miss a deadline without prior notice forfeit remaining tranches; completion expected within 3 months of the prior payment.
• A new stellar/stellar-protocol discussion opened on atomic contract migrations using a __migrate function pattern.
• The Stellar Indexer SDK entered public beta on JSR, providing direct access to live Soroban contract data with protocol extensions for Blend and Soroban Domains.
• Stellar Wallets Kit from Creit Tech unifies Soroban dApp wallet integration across Freighter, xBull, Albedo, and Rabet behind a single API.
• SocketFi released @socketfi/server, a Node.js paymaster SDK for Express, Next.js, NestJS, Fastify, and serverless runtimes.
• Stellar Brazil opened Stellar Summit attendee registration.

Upcoming Events

• July 10 Monthly Stellar Ecosystem Update, X Spaces
• July 10 Stellar Chile Community Call, Discord
• July 10 Stellar Town Hall, Discord
• July 13 Weekly Brazilian Ambassador Meeting, Discord
• July 14 StarMaker Community Call, Google Meet
• July 15 Stellar Ecosystem Impact: Founders & Investor Mixer, Nairobi, Kenya
• July 16 Stellar Developers Meeting, Discord
• July 16 E.Africa Weekly Community Call, Discord
• July 18 Stellar Builders Camp, Goa Edition, Goa, India
• July 18 Built in Nairobi: Stellar Impact Studio Demo Day, Nairobi, Kenya

Ambassador Activity

Stellar Indonesia ran the Build on Stellar Bootcamp in Bandung on July 4. A Yogyakarta bootcamp the prior week had 35 builders deploy MVPs to Stellar mainnet in two days. 13 new ambassadors from Solo were officially onboarded.

Stellar Philippines hosted StellarX PH Demo Days in Mindanao (July 4) and Metro Manila (July 10). A bootcamp at Baliuag University drew 115 builders and yielded 71 project submissions.

Starmaker (LATAM) ran Pulso Halftime Demo events simultaneously in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá on July 6. Stellar Turkey organized a community meetup in Istanbul on July 10.

What to Watch

• Protocol 27 tooling adoption: Zipper is live on mainnet; watch for wallet SDK updates, relayer integrations, and dApp migrations to the new auth delegation and bundled auth entry model.
• CAP-0084 and CAP-0085: both are under active community review; the July 16 developer meeting continues the discussion.
• APAC Stellar Hackathon: final submission deadline July 15, Demo Day July 18, Grand Finale July 24.
• Nairobi activity: Stellar Ecosystem Impact investor mixer July 15 and Built in Nairobi Demo Day July 18.
• USDM1 institutional integration: watch for formal reporting on live collateral use at Bank of America, Citadel Securities, and Virtu Financial.