Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
2025 Year in Review
Recorded: Feb. 6, 2026 Duration: 0:51:47Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are going to get started with our 2025
year in review. I'm Ellen Canale. I'm head of communications here at SDF and we are super
excited to have you all tuning in. Today we're going to take a step back from the
day-to-day and take a look at what happened on the network in 2025. A lot of you were here for
it so it may not be surprising but we're excited to talk about what shipped, what scaled, and where
momentum is coming from. I think it's safe to say that 2025 was not just another year of progress,
it was a huge year marked by a lot of validation.
We saw big names jump into the space headfirst, which set off a domino effect that changed the
conversation from is blockchain viable to where does it work and how should it be deployed best?
So over the next half an hour, we're going to walk through how that shift showed up on Stellar.
You'll see how partners across different contexts, from global asset managers to major payment
companies to sovereign governments, used open infrastructure to solve concrete financial
problems.
You're going to see how the activity translated into measurable network growth, from developers
and active accounts to TVL and real-world assets on chain. As always,
and if you are new to this stream, we'll leave time for questions at the end. We're excited to
hear from you and you can submit those at any point. With that, let's get started.
So today I'm joined by Danelle Dixon, our CEO and Executive Director, Jose Fernandez de Ponte, our president and chief growth officer,
and Tomer Weller, our chief product officer. Danelle will open with macro forces that define
2025 and marked it as an inflection point for open financial infrastructure. From there,
we'll move into the numbers. We'll talk about the network activity, real usage,
and the metrics that matter for adoption. And then we're going to spend the bulk of our time talking about the year.
You'll hear about institutions and payment companies, like I said, developers,
governments using Stellar to solve the real problems that we talk about every day.
And after that, we'll discuss the infrastructure and product momentum that made it all possible,
including performance upgrades, privacy, and the capabilities that
are required for the next phase of adoption.
So then Danelle will talk a little bit about the look ahead.
We actually published the SDF strategy recently, and she's going to outline how we're going
to carry forward what worked in 2025 into a focus 2026 direction, and how SDF is prioritizing how it can best support
the network and the ecosystem.
And then we will end it and lead to Q&A.
So thank you so much for joining us today.
We're super excited to be here,
and I'm going to hand it over to Danelle to kick us off.
Well, thanks, Ellen, and hello, everyone.
It's really great to be with you today.
Thank you for joining. In 2025, the industry crossed a threshold. Regulation became clearer,
adoption accelerated, and real deployments started to scale. Now, that shift brought
institutional confidence, which has been awesome. It changed market expectations and made execution the new measure.
So that's been an awesome change.
And when we look at the activity on Stellar,
it reflects a network that was really built
to meet this moment.
Reliable, scalable, and usable.
So in total, Stellar has processed
21.5 billion operations with 3.6 billion transactions in 2025 alone.
That level of activity reflects sustained usage across a wide range of live financial applications and really keeps Stellar as one of the most used blockchains to date. The network maintained its 99.99% uptime, a performance characteristic that remained consistent
even as overall activity increased.
Transaction costs stayed super low, with the average fee per operation at approximately
0.0007 cents, supporting high frequency and high volume use cases.
So by year's end, the network had reached 10.3 million unique users.
So taken together, these metrics really show a network operating at scale with the reliability,
the performance, and the cost structure that global financial infrastructure requires.
and the cost structure that global financial infrastructure requires.
So the foundation is what powers a thriving and growing financial ecosystem.
So let's dig deeper into 2025.
2025 was one of the most exciting years we've seen in the last decade.
The recognition that financial services is truly the killer use case was a huge, huge win for the industry.
The work commitment and vision of Stellar Builders really finally manifested and frankly, it was really validated.
The real opportunity now is not letting that momentum fade and seizing on all the progress that was made last year.
So as we look back on 2025,
we are going to start with some of the key areas that we tracked.
The focus was on strengthening foundational building blocks
and creating a really robust pipeline for 2026.
So let me hand it over to Jose to walk us through
where those metrics landed.
Thank you, Danelle.
In 2025, we were very deliberate about where to focus our effort. We center
network activity that translates into durable use. You can see that in the numbers. Monthly
active addresses reached 632,000, up 24% year on year. That reflects a steady growth in
real users, not one-off spikes of spikes not bots the total value logged
ended the year at 173 million a 127 percent increase this growth came from deploy production
and from growth in our a defy ecosystem and unchanged real assets, reached 785 million by the end of the year, up 158% year on year.
We also expanded the set of tokenized treasuries on the network, a proof point that this network continues to grow each month,
and it is already one of the largest blockchain ecosystems
for real world assets.
All these results show sustained partners' execution.
The focus helped clarify where SDF's work
creates the most leverage.
Importantly, this focus translated
into some of the most meaningful integrations
that we have seen on Stellar to date. With that foundation in place, I'll hand it back
to Danelle.
All right. Well, thanks, Jose. It's really great to look back on how that focus translated
into measurable progress. So Stellar has long attracted really serious builders that are
focused on modernizing financial infrastructure.
The regulatory clarity that came last year really accelerated this momentum, and 2025 marked blockchain's arrival as an accepted financial rail. And the proof is in who's
building on it. Asset managers with trillions under management, major multinational banks and payments giants serving hundreds of millions of customers globally.
From early movers to new entrants, institutions recognize Stellar is the blockchain for financial services.
So let's take a look at what was built and deployed on Stellar in 2025.
So Franklin Templeton is a clear example of institutional adoption at scale, using public
blockchain infrastructure to extend regulated financial products. On Stellar, Franklin Templeton
has issued over $580 million in tokenized U.S. treasuries and has seen 85% year-on-year growth
in Benji, its asset. That growth reflects very specific institutional requirements
being met in production. Multi-jurisdictional deployment that expands access to European
institutional investors, Benji anchoring global liquidity for regulated on-chain yield products,
and net new products offerings like intraday yield, which is a pretty awesome thing, which unlocks returns on capital,
even during partial trading days. What's important here isn't just the volume,
it's the fact that these products operate reliably and at scale. With precise asset
tracking and compliance settlement, Stellar really provides that infrastructure that makes it possible.
So this is exactly what regulated on-chain finance looks like
when it's purpose-built for institutional use.
So next, let's go to U.S. Bank.
It's another example of how large banks are approaching programmable money
in a disciplined way.
Notably, it's the only major U.S. bank that has publicly announced testing
on an open infrastructure among several of its peers
that are actively exploring this space. They're assessing what it takes to issue and manage
digital assets while staying aligned with regulatory and operational requirements from
the start. So the key point in their assessment is where those requirements live. As Mike Milano
notes, controls like asset freezing and transaction unwinding are built in to the base operating layer of this network.
And that matters because banks need certainty around compliance, reversibility and safeguards before anything moves forward.
So for U.S. banks, Stellar provides that infrastructure designed for those particular realities. It supports programmable money
with native controls that align with how regulated financial institutions operate. So these are
a couple snapshots of how institutions are engaging with real world assets on Stellar.
So let's look at how real world assets showed up across the Stellar network in 2025. 2025
was a breakout year for real world assets on Stellar. And as
Jose mentioned earlier, RWA and stablecoin activity surpassed a billion on chain of 123%
year over year. And I want to pause on that for a second, because that is a big deal.
That level of capital moving through open infrastructure in live market conditions,
it reflects real adoption. Real adoption at scale. Jose, I'll bring this to life with
PayPal.
Thank you, Danelle. As some of you may know, this one is especially close to my heart.
PYUSD is now the fourth largest USD stablecoin
in my market cap and the third largest by number of holders. PayPal bringing PYUSD to Stellar is
a concrete step towards stablecoins operated at global commerce scale. We are seeing that demand
directly from merchants. In a recent survey by PayPal, 4 in 10 US merchants now accept digital assets already.
The takeaway here, stable coins are advancing steadily into everyday business use.
So this is a payments leader that is extending regulated stable coin infrastructure onto a network that is designed for speed, for cost efficiency, and reach. BOSD on Stellar expands PayPal's stablecoin
beyond EVM environments
and onto a payments-optimized public blockchain.
That matters because it supports real flows,
cross-border payments, merchant settlement, payroll,
working capital inside an already existing global network.
At its core, this is PayPal choosing infrastructure
that can support
how money already moves at the scale that they operate. And I just landed from attending the
On The Summit in New York City this week. So let's talk about what that team built on on Stellar
this year. USDY represents a meaningful expansion of how yield shows up on chain this is a u.s treasury-backed product designed for
institutional standards now accessible through a public blockchain on the chosen stellar to launch
usdy because the ecosystem supports regulated access liquidity and real distribution usdy delivers
short duration treasury exposure with a reported 5.3% APY,
while maintaining the stability and accessibility that institutions require.
What is notable here is reach.
By launching on Stellar, institutional-grade yield
becomes available to a broader on-chain user base
without compromising liquidity or compliance.
This brings institutional yield into an environment
that is designed for real
financial activity let's also talk about an asset class that is gaining momentum
tokenized real estate red swan shows how tokenization is extending beyond treasuries
and into core asset classes like commercial real estate. Over $100 million in institutional grade real estate
have already been issued and transacted on Stellar,
including multifamily and hospitality assets.
Tokenization brings liquidity and transparency
into markets that have historically been slow, opaque,
and difficult to access.
It is a clear example of RWAs moving into everyday investment categories
using blockchain to broaden access while maintaining institutional standards. Across
all of these partnerships, the common thread is usage. Value in motion as opposed to value at
rest. And that is why payments have become the clearest proof point. Danelle?
become the clearest proof point. Danelle?
Well, that's awesome. Thanks, Jose.
55.6 billion in payment volume, up 52% year over year.
Guys, this is really significant.
It reflects sustained payment activity across remittances,
commerce, and public sector rails on Stellar.
That kind of volume doesn't just happen by accident.
So, Jose, I'm going to send it back over to you.
What does it look like for remittances?
Yeah, let's talk about remittances.
So let's talk about MoneyGram and its stablecoin power mobile app with CrossMint.
MoneyGram is putting stablecoins directly into high-volume remittance flows.
Their launch in Colombia provides critical access to the global financial system for families
who rely on cross-border payments for everyday needs.
It delivers faster settlement, lower cost,
without changing the user experience
that people already know.
That is why this corridor matters.
It is built to operate at scale
inside an established global payments network.
Colombia is just the first market,
with the same structure designed to extend across major
remittance corridors like Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines.
This is exactly how stablecoins move
into everyday financial infrastructure,
by integrating where the money is already moving.
Another example is on credit cards.
So Visa and Wirex give us a great example of how stablecoins are being integrated directly into existing card payment flows.
In this case, card transactions are settling on-chain in USDC and URC across both USD and Euro markets with continuous availability.
That usage has scaled quickly. Visa's stablecoin settlement is now roughly
at a $4.6 billion run rate across all chains,
up more than four times since September.
This setup improves how funds move behind the scenes,
faster settlement, lower operational friction,
and clearer visibility across markets.
Importantly, this is Visa deploying Stellar as part of its settlement infrastructure,
not as an overlay or a workaround.
When a global car network operates this way, it reflects confidence in performance,
consistency, and regulatory alignment at scale.
This is one pattern of adoption.
The Nell will show us these same rails are powering national digital infrastructure from universal basic income to everyday government
payments. Yeah, so we've talked about stablecoins moving money through individual corridors,
remittances, card settlement, and institutional flows. The Marshall Islands extends that pattern
to an entire national payment system. So in December, the Republic, the Marshall Islands extends that pattern to an entire national
payment system. So in December, the Republic of the Marshall Islands launched the world's
first on-chain distribution of universal basic income. Since then, more than 1.3 billion has
been distributed using USDM-1, a digitally native sovereign instrument backed by U.S. Treasury bills. Payments flows directly to citizens' wallets with consistency, traceability, and reliability
across widely dispersed islands.
For a geographically dispersed nation like the Marshall Islands, this really solved a
long-standing distribution challenge.
Payments reached people reliably without relying on manual delivery or fragmented local infrastructure.
That's open financial rails, supporting a sovereign's responsibility at national scope.
So delivering payments at that level puts real pressure on the network underneath it.
And that's what brings us to the infrastructure work that makes this possible.
Tomer is going to walk us through WISC and the protocol
upgrades designed to support sustained enterprise grade use at this scale. Take it away Tomer.
Thanks Danelle. In September 2025, we shipped WISC, the largest protocol upgrade Stellar has
delivered since more contracts. This release was focused on increasing capacity and allowing high
volume financial applications
to run in production with plenty of headroom for growth
while keeping fees minimal.
Wisk introduced eight core caps that materially changed
how the network executes transactions.
Parallel transaction execution increased throughput
under real world load.
Caching for store bond state and contracts
ensures that live state is readily available
and cheap to access. We couldn't have done this without the solid foundation provided by Soroban's
state archival that we delivered in 2024. And to wrap it all, unified asset events make it easier
than ever to consume token events across the entire stellar ecosystem, blurring the line between Classic and Soroban.
As a result, our theoretical max TPS test is now at 3,000.
And more importantly, this allowed validators
to vote on a series of configuration changes
to increase capacity and reduce cost.
The latest change, SLP4, or SLP4, was voted on just last week.
SLP4 has doubled most of Soroban's ledger limits
and reduced costs for non-refundable resources
by up to four times.
And I'm glad to say that overall,
we've seen a 70% cost reduction
in smart contracts and vacations this week alone,
and we're not done yet.
WISC makes it possible to operate at enterprise scale
with minimal costs and no compromises.
The next requirement institutions raise is control,
specifically around confidentiality and compliance,
which is what the next upgrade was designed to support.
Privacy is the next big opportunity for blockchains.
Businesses and individuals alike should be able
to transact without sharing their full transaction history with the world. And they need to do this
in a way that prevents misuse and preserves regulatory compliance. X-Ray, now live on mainnet,
facilitates privacy by extending the set of cryptographic building blocks available to
builders on stuff. These primitives make Stellar the most comprehensive L1 for zero knowledge
cryptography, which is the foundation for the most robust privacy
preserving systems available today.
More specifically, we've integrated the BN254 elliptic curve for compatibility
with systems designed for the Ethereum ecosystem.
And we've also introduced built in Poseidon and Poseidon2
implementations, which are ZK-friendly hash functions.
Integrating these at the core runtime means the developers
can build privacy-preserving applications while keeping
performance predictable and the cost down.
This facilitates privacy that is configurable by design.
Applications can configure compliance features as appropriate for the use case.
For example, select a disclosure of sensitive information when required for audits, counterparties, or regulators, while keeping sensitive details protected by default.
This gives teams the control they need to operate within established compliance and governance frameworks.
The result is a privacy model that supports enterprise deployment today with native controls,
clear disclosure paths, and infrastructure designed to operate reliably.
All this work has been met with a lot of enthusiasm from our ecosystem,
and they're already building the future of ZK Onstelling.
Danelle?
So, yeah, that was privacy, parallelism, and yes, Jerome,
apparently we're calling it slips at this point.
So thank you, Tomer.
What we're seeing now is momentum driven by real pressure on the system.
New usage patterns, new actors, and new risk models emerging at the same time.
So that momentum is showing up
in multiple directions all at once.
So Tomer's gonna walk us through some of those areas
and why they matter going forward.
Right back at you, Tomer.
Thanks, Danelle.
So a lot has happened in 2025.
Agents have been getting a lot
of well-deserved attention recently,
and we believe that agentic payments will explode in volume in 2026.
To that end, we've been collaborating with Coinbase and specifically the X402 team
to ensure machine-to-machine payments are standardized
and that Stellar has first-class implementation for them.
Expect more announcements in the very near future for X402 on Stellar has first-class implementation for them. Expect more announcements in the very near future
for X402 on Stellar.
Also in 2025, breakthroughs in quantum computing
have clarified that post-quantum security
is no longer a distant problem.
Luckily, Stellar was built with crypto agility in mind,
so the core Stellar protocol can be easily upgraded
with new signing schemes as these become available.
Additionally, Sorobon contract accounts allow developers to prototype and build smart wallets
with new signing schemes without any core upgrades.
So today.
One such example is the soundness team that already has such a post-quantum ready smart
wallet prototype utilizing zero knowledge
cryptography under the hood.
And there are many more coming in 2026.
Our focus is on resilience, standard based primitives, upgradeability,
and just avoiding assumptions that don't age well.
I'll hand it back to you to know.
I like that.
Avoiding assumptions that don't age well.
Okay. Stellar has always been rooted in
utility and what works. We have our eyes on what it's going to take to build systems that remain
viable as conditions evolve. Growth at this stage comes from resilience. And we've been at this for
a really long time. Standards-based primitive, upgrade paths that don't break trust,
and avoiding assumptions that don't age well.
So those are the things that we need to really focus on.
That's what's driving momentum across the ecosystem today.
Jose is going to share what that momentum looks like in practice.
Take it away, Jose.
Thank you, Danelle.
Let's talk about developers.
Developers guide the Stellar network.
Developers tell us where to go.
And when we look at developer growth,
we focus on where builders are choosing to spend their time,
especially in a very competitive market.
Over the last three years,
the Stellar developer community almost tripled
with a growth rate of 171%.
This growth significantly outperforms the broader industry,
which saw a decline in total number of developers
over the same period.
The Stellar developer base is growing significantly faster
than other ecosystems, whether EVM or SVM.
That reflects deliberate choice and makes Stellar
one of the fastest growing blockchains for devs.
And we will continue to grow our share of developer activity.
We also see this on the ground.
Hack Meridian in Brazil brought together hundreds of builders and led to over 100 new projects and missions.
At Consensus in Toronto, the first Stellar Builder Summit convened more than 100 developers
working directly on payments, DeFi, and asset infrastructure.
Our Ambassador Program is growing and holding events
worldwide.
And by the end of the year, the network
saw more than 8,000 new builders at events, workshops,
and hackathons around the world.
Developers follow environments where teams can ship,
grow, and reach users.
And the data shows that builders are continuing to choose Stellar for that work.
We have spent the last several minutes unpacking different parts of the ecosystem.
On payments, on asset tokenization, financial institutions, public sector,
and what you're seeing here brings it all together.
In 2025, institutions chose Stellar
to meet concrete requirements of scale,
being compliance forward and reliable.
The work spans many sectors and regions,
but the underlying pattern is the same.
Partners are using the network to move value,
to issue assets, and to support regulated activity.
What matters here is consistency.
The same core infrastructure is supporting
developers building new applications and partners deploying them into real markets. By the end of
the year, that created a stable base, an ecosystem that has active participants, repeatable patterns,
and shared standards. That base is what we are carrying over into 2026. Danelle will share now how we are building from here.
Thanks, Jose.
Really, really wonderful work.
What we're seeing here is real momentum across institutions, developers, and partners who are choosing Stellar because it works.
That gives us an incredible foundation heading into 2026.
And now we get to be intentional of where about where
that takes us next so all right this is where it gets really interesting everything we're doing in
2026 is guided by these four anchors they're simple they're intentional and they keep us
focused on what actually matters first open participation We're building for real people, real institution, and real economies.
Access matters.
If it can't reach the world, it's not doing its job.
Second, everyday financial utility.
Payments, savings, and financial tools that people and businesses actually use.
This is about usefulness at scale.
Third, trustworthy tech stack. It's about all those
things that we just talked about. Partners choose stellar because it's reliable, it's consistent,
and it's built to support serious systems over time. That's trust that's earned, and we protect
that. And fourth, outcome-oriented execution. We move with purpose.
We focus on what delivers results.
We learn quickly and we keep raising the bar.
These anchors inform how we decide where to invest,
how we support partners,
and what we say yes and a lot of times no to.
So as we look ahead in 2026, here's where we are focused.
First, accelerating asset adoption and cross-border usage.
So that means enabling capital to move across markets, currencies, and
jurisdictions reliably and at scale.
Second, enabling seamless enterprise and institutional adoption.
So we're really focused on infrastructure that supports real operational requirements,
including compliance, reliability, and global reach.
Third, advancing core network capabilities.
Even though we have this awesome system, we can't just stop here.
We have to continue to invest in performance, security, and reliability so the network can
support high volume financial systems.
So together these priorities reinforce one another.
Adoption advances when infrastructure, institutions, and capital move together.
That's the direction we're heading in 2026.
Clarity, focus, and with a ton of confidence.
So as we look to 2026 and beyond, I want to share how we're organizing our resources to
support what comes next.
In November, we updated our mandate framework, which maps directly to three strategic priorities
that I just walked through.
And today, you guys might have seen, we moved some XLM between accounts
to ensure transparency for how we fund
the four pillars of our mandate.
Stellar growth, where we're putting the most resources,
developer programs, hackathons,
our enterprise fund that backs wallets
and payment companies,
and anything that drives real adoption.
This is how we make Stellar seamless to build on and
seamless to use. The next one, product innovation. It's about building and seeing around the next
corner. Sometimes we build tools. Sometimes we acquire them. Sometimes we fund others to create
them. It's if something's missing that the ecosystem needs, this fund will help sure that
it gets built. Assets and liquidity. This one's new. And honestly, it's where the market is
telling us to focus. Having the fastest blockchain means absolutely nothing if there aren't real
assets moving across it. So this funds partnerships to get stable coins and tokenized assets on
Stellar. Market making so that the assets are actually tradable and all of the on and off ramps and the compliance work that needs to make them useful and really used in the real world.
And then finally, SDF development, which funds SDF's operational expenses.
You can track all of this in real time, including the move we just made today.
We publish our XLM balances and quarterly reports just like we always have, and the update reflects
where Stellar is today, production infrastructure for real financial applications. In 2025, we clearly
saw that Stellar works for partners because it gives them what they need to operate in the real world.
We saw a global asset manager tokenize hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. treasuries.
We saw a sovereign nation deliver universal basic income to its citizens.
Different objectives, different contexts, the same network.
Demonstrates the flexibility and ease of use. That matters. It shows that
Stellar can support serious capital and public purpose at the very same time without compromising
on scale, trust, or scalability. Across the ecosystem, partners weren't testing ideas.
They were advancing real initiatives with clear goals, moving value, serving people,
and building systems designed to grow. And they chose Stellar because it meets the requirements
where finance, infrastructure, and responsibility converge. In 2026, we're building from strength,
and the takeaway is simple. Financial services are the use case and Stellar is delivering from
payments at scale to new asset classes to bringing on the partners enabling the next phase of growth.
This is what Stellar was built for. So a big part of that work is how we bring people together
around what's already working and how we help it scale. This is the
year to be the part of the Stellar ecosystem. So Ellen, tell us about two ways you can do that.
I would love to, Danelle. Okay, so each year we host Meridian, the annual Stellar conference,
and this year the Stellar ecosystem is headed to Abu Dhabi in October, the annual stellar conference. And this year, the stellar ecosystem
is headed to Abu Dhabi in October, which is so exciting. Meridian is where partners share their
work, share what's scaling, and talk about what is coming next. And of course, celebrate the amazing
work that's happening on the network and the builders who are doing it. So we can't wait.
It's two full days focused on real deployments shaping
global finance and this week we actually opened a call for speakers um so if you're doing the work
and you want to talk about it at meridian scan the qr code here and apply we are super excited
to hear from you and can't wait to see what you guys think up and dream up for the stage
uh the the next opportunity is a little more intimate.
And it's something new we kicked off last year.
It's called Stellar House.
And it's where builders and operators and partners are coming together to like really personally connect, compare their notes, think about like partnerships that could be coming, share big ideas.
And we host these in cities where momentum is real.
So last year we hit
New York and Miami and next up is Mexico City and it's happening in April. So if you're building on
Stellar and LATAM, we'd love to see you there. More details will surface in the next couple of
weeks. So keep your eyes peeled. And of course, follow us at Stellar.org because we will definitely be talking about it there.
Okay. So I think here are the takeaways. We're innovating. The ecosystem is growing
and Stellar is attracting some of the biggest names driving adoption. The financial system
is modernizing and Stellar is the infrastructure to power it. So now's your chance to ask all your
questions, all your burning questions right now of our executives. So let's your chance to ask all your questions, all your burning questions
right now of our executives. So let's open it up and see what you guys got for us.
All right. One question we have, Danelle, or actually any executive, anyone on the stage,
actually any executive, anyone on the stage, is what are you guys most excited for for 2026?
Let's start easy. I'll jump in first and just say I'm excited to see the privacy,
like how we really think through privacy, because I think institutional privacy is different from the
retail privacy side, and we don't want to obliterate the value of blockchain as we're implementing privacy on chain. So Tomer's doing
a ton of work on this. Like there's lots of folks outside that are doing a lot of work on this.
And I think that we got privacy wrong in the web two days because we sort of just didn't really
focus in detail around it. And we ended up with all those silly cookie footers and all the things that we have globally.
And I think that when we're looking at privacy on chain,
we need to make sure and protect the value
of the immutable record, the traceability,
all those things while still recognizing
that for global financial infrastructure,
you need to have privacy of competitive information
as well as for individuals.
So I'm just really excited that we're focusing here,
that not just us, but we certainly are, but others are too.
And the outcomes, I think, are going to be super valuable for the network,
but also just for the speaker system at large.
Tomer, what are you excited about?
I'm excited about scale.
I think that we've been talking a lot about how functionally and feature-wise we're pretty
much feature complete.
But I think that we have Wisk put in a lot of building blocks to scale up the network,
especially on the execution layer.
We still have some building blocks around the lower level networking, the peer-to-peer network consensus.
There's some GED code from 2014 that we probably need to rip apart because it's not a space station.
That's hilarious, actually. Can't go without a Jed reference.
Okay. We have another question here, and I'm going to throw it to Jose, which is,
how much of PYUSD is on Stellar right now, Jose?
Yeah, one of the beauty of blockchains is you can see that on the Explorer, right?
So the number is, I think it's about 7 million now in terms of market cap.
Interestingly, the velocity of those assets is already pretty high if you look
at transaction volume it's about six times that in just a couple of uh months which is really
important because again we're talking about a value motion versus value at rest so the posd
that is on the stellar network is rotating and it's being used for real world cases you put it in context a this is very
normal to be in the relatively single digit millions a couple of months after launch when
paypal launched on ethereum three years ago and it sounds weird to speak in the third person there
but in the first couple of months that that was on ethereum i think it was seven eight nine so
that's the normal pattern toward adoption and i would would keep an eye on evolution on POSD and Stellar.
There is a ton that is coming up in terms of adoption in DeFi,
in terms of institutional use case.
So we have a ton of expectation about growth of POSD there.
We see already two of the largest, I would say three stable coins out there
for real-world use cases that are deployed on Stellar.
And we believe that POSD is going to do really well in our ecosystem.
Awesome.
Okay.
There's a few questions talking about RWAs headed towards consumers and consumer apps
and the difference between kind of the consumer audience and this more institutional grade protocol. So Danelle,
can you talk a little bit about where, you know, how we're focused on maybe institutional grade
protocols and consumer apps and how we think about both of those? Well, the truth is we actually
need both, right? You need to be able to, in Sorbonne, we see so much activity with the
individuals jumping in and being able to create that savings opportunity or the yield bearing access that they need.
But you also need the institutional grade assets so that you have those to be available to the consumers.
It's an interesting thing. I'll tell you that way back in in 2019, I guess, when I first came on, when we were really revamping and really focusing around the
mission, we ultimately wanted the mission to be able to have that consumer lens to it. But then
we realized that as we're building infrastructure, the infrastructure is really built for the
businesses and for the institutions, but it's the B2B to C play, right? So we need infrastructure
to be available and to be scalable and to be strong for the
institutional great actors so that they can bring these valuable assets to the consumers.
So I wouldn't say that it's changed any of our focus. I think that ultimately we want to see
humans, small businesses, large institutions be able to access this. But the ones that we touch
mostly are the ones that are going to be the institutions and the small businesses that are building on Stellar. So I think that that's
the way to think about this. This infrastructure has to be relatable, flexible, serious for all
of those players. And ultimately, hopefully the humans on the other side are the ones that are
going to benefit from it. Awesome. Great. One quick question that I'm going to take is an ask around whether or not we'll have events planned for Europe. We're going to have events just about everywhere this year, so stay tuned. We have a growing ambassador program where events are happening all the time. We're going to be at all the big conferences this year. So in Europe, we'll be at Paris Blockchain Week. We'll be at ECC. We're going to be, we'll be at Istanbul
Blockchain Week doing something really big and exciting there again this year. So keep your eyes
peeled. We're going to be everywhere and we'd love to see you there. So like I said,
We're going to be everywhere and we'd love to see you there.
So like I said, at Stellar Org is your best shot at knowing where we're headed.
And we'll keep you guys all posted as those plans start to come together for 2026.
Okay.
Let me just jump in, Ellen.
I see that there's a question about discussion regarding decentralization on Stellar, but
that wasn't a topic that was talked about today.
Honestly, that's just something that we're constantly, constantly having in our discussions
and also having in the work that we're doing.
This is about, there's also some questions in here about tier one validators.
We're always thinking about creating larger validators, larger networks of validators, we're always thinking about creating larger validators, larger networks of validators,
so that we can make sure that there's more that are brought into tier one. This is work that's
being done constantly. So even if it wasn't mentioned today, it's crucial to continue to
focus on decentralization, to continue to focus on the validator group and who's participating
in the tier one validator network. And this is something you've seen changes to it in 2025 you saw growth of it you're going to continue to see that and this is an area for
us we want more people to run validators and that are serious about running validators so
if that's something you're interested there's and please reach out to us because there's ways that
we can help to get you involved awesome okay here's one for Tomer.
What's your take on community-built alternatives for RPCs or even core in other languages besides
Go or C++?
Yes.
Anyone who has spent any time with me in the past couple of months know that I can't
shut up about agent decoding.
I think the world has completely changed and shifted, and it's beautiful, and computers
are the most
fun they've been since the 90s.
So everything is awesome.
And specifically rewriting software, well-specced, well-tested software is one of the greatest
use cases of agent decoding.
And so we've been seeing a lot of projects of like, you know, taking like this ancient code base, turning it to Rust.
Anthropic actually just released with Opus 4.6 yesterday, an experiment of like completely rewriting the C compiler in Rust using LLM.
So this is an amazing use case.
This is an amazing use case.
More Stellar-specific, Lee from the engineering team
has actually created one of the projects,
one legacy project that we have in the ecosystem.
It's called XDRgen.
That's this Ruby project to auto-generate XDR libraries
from XDR specifications.
And it's in Ruby.
No one in Stellar actually writes Ruby anymore.
So it's kind of like this legacy thing.
And Leek completely rewrote it from scratch in Rust.
It's amazing.
And we're going to start utilizing that
as the main XDR gen soon.
So it's great.
If you're lurking on my GitHub,
you know that I have a little little toy StellarCore Rust project, which tries to, as a proof of concept, to do that for StellarCore.
StellarCore is a very complicated code base, like 350,000 lines of code. It's like super delicate.
I think that doing a rewrite of something like that is still, you know, TBD if this is actually something that we want to do because there's a lot of
sensitivities there. A blockchain needs to have, the accuracy needs to be up to the individual bit
and so you really can't get anything wrong. And so not sure if we're going to see Stellar Core
being replaced anytime soon, but I do think something like RPC or even other projects in
the ecosystem, I would love to see more community engagement
there.
OK, awesome.
I'm going to throw it to Jose.
Can we expect a DTCC stellar announcement soon?
Yeah, I think we will not talk about specific names.
But I would say, first of all, there
is a lot of conferences that are coming up in the next few weeks.
We'll be at Consensus in Hong Kong next week. We'll be in Tokenize Japan.
There are a few announcements in general that are coming up because we are really chasing that institutional enterprise segment.
As you know, we have a bunch of names on Forbes Global 2000 already that have chosen to deploy in Stellar.
We have a very intentional effort
to triple the number within this year.
So there will be a bunch of announcements
that will be coming up as soon as the first half of this year.
TRANSCRIPT WONG- Translation, get excited, everybody.
OK, so Danelle, we'll take two more questions.
Danelle, we've got some questions around privacy.
And I think, you know, it's an important one for us
as we've talked about like how to, you know,
talk more about what is privacy?
What does institutional privacy mean?
How does transparency and privacy work together
on a network like Stellar
while still preserving the inherent benefits and
advantages of an open and transparent network. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how
we're thinking about that. Well, yeah, and I saw the questions were mostly about the dubiousness
of the notion that privacy is actually what anybody wants. Look, KYC is one thing,
right? Like when you think about KYC, you're dealing with money, you're dealing with financial
institutions. This is something that's just required from a regulatory standpoint.
So the question that was written in the chat was like, you know, they require KYC, they require us
to photo all the time, all of those things. And so really do they care about privacy? That's their regulatory obligation, like unfortunately or fortunately,
like I think it protects a lot of us. It makes it so that people have a harder time committing
fraud within trying to get into your assets when you're dealing with financial institutions.
So that's one component of it. Privacy is from the, you know, in different, certainly in different
countries and in different
states, privacy comes from institutions and individuals have privacy. And the privacy idea
is that what you have a expectation of privacy in the things that you do. That is what blockchain
allows, right? It's this expectation of privacy that you can actually protect your data. And
because it's anonymous as it goes back
and forth, but you can still have that transparent flow and you can still prove that the money
moved from point A to point B. I think ZKs are going to do a lot to be able to protect
the individuals on the edge without obliterating the very transparent and the auditability of
the blockchain itself. This is an area that I think is really important.
And in terms of like institutional privacy,
it's this really complicated discussion because people are like,
why should institutions have privacy about competitive information?
But the truth is you're not going to get institutions to build on this tech
stack if they can't protect the flow of their funds,
meaning how much they put in and they sent to out in the world
and that competitive information from others,
other competitors that are out there.
So we need to figure out, and there's payment channels,
there's lots of way to do this on Stellar already.
And so you're going to kind of combine all of these things
while still protecting the value of the blockchain,
which is the immutable history,
it is the transparency and
the traceability of it. It doesn't ever mean that everybody gets to know exactly which funds Tomer
is sending out to do things with, but you will be able to protect the flow of those funds and know
where they started and where they ended. And that's, I think, what's really important. So
this is a, I think that this is a really important discussion and a really important
area.
We're going to, I'm going to focus more on this myself, just in some writings.
I know Tomer is just hyper-focused on this from the standpoint of the product and the
tech stack, but we're going to try to make this really good from protecting those things
that we care about in the blockchain and protecting the usefulness of blockchain while still making
sure that we're going to have institutional adoption and that users can protect their privacy.
Thanks, Danelle. Definitely more to come on that topic. It's part of our strategy,
as Danelle was talking about. It's part of the work that the product team has been heads down
on. And I think there's some really exciting stuff ahead that we're really excited to share with you guys quite soon.
So and through through the year. So keep your eyes peeled on for that one as well.
All right. Last question. We're going to throw it to Tomer.
Is the Stellar Audit Bank an open funded and open fund now?
Open ended fund now. Sorry. I love agentic coding.
But in regards to financial tools, I trust, I really
prefer some humans to also look over things. Don't we all? All right, Tomer. Sure. And thank you,
Danelle, for using me as an example for a person who sends money privately over the internet for
things. Yes, the Audibank is going strong. You know, Danelle mentioned that trustworthy technology is one of our core North Stars.
And we have a dedicated budget for continually supporting new applications in the ecosystem.
Obviously, DeFi is a sensitive area, and we want to make sure that we're covered there.
area and we want to make sure that we're covered there. And we're building tools not just for that,
but also for ongoing monitoring of the network, both the core network and for protocols.
We're investing even more into formal verification, given that there are more agents writing code.
We want to make sure that we're throwing as much tooling
as we can, both automated and human beings,
to ensure that the network stays trustworthy.
Awesome.
OK, I think that's it for today.
Thank you all so much for joining us today.
This was actually the first time we've live streamed on X and YouTube and LinkedIn.
We will definitely be back in Q1 doing the same.
So thank you so much for tuning in today live.
On behalf of all of us here, we are always excited to share the information and hear
from you all and answer the questions.
So hope you enjoy the 2025 year in review.
For those of you who want to
listen again, you'll be able to rewatch this on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. We will see you in a few
months to talk Q1. And hopefully by then we may be talking about YOLO P26. So thanks everyone for
joining. We'll see you soon. Bye everyone.
