The Story of Kale 🥬
Author
Bri Wylde
Publishing date
When smart contracts launched on Stellar almost two years ago, I wouldn’t have predicted that a small farming game called KALE would resonate with so many builders and community members. Yet here we are. KALE started as a fun SDF-driven side project but has grown quickly in the ecosystem, capturing the community’s attention and having a powerful impact on the network.
It all started in October 2024, when community member earrietadev introduced the first proof-of-work (PoW) asset on Stellar: FCM. Unlike traditional tokens, FCM could only be minted by mining it through a smart contract. It is a winner-takes-all competition where one miner claims all the FCM for each block.
The project gained popularity quickly, as the Stellar community exchanged over 3,700 messages in the FCM Discord forum in just a couple of months. Inspired by that momentum, SDF’s very own Tyler van der Hoeven introduced a similar project: a proof-of-teamwork mining contract, where miners (or farmers) worked together to farm KALE tokens, with the protocol distributing KALE to all working farmers based on their contributions.
FCM was popular, but KALE was meteoric. Within months, it evolved into a Stellar ecosystem phenomenon, spawning numerous games, side projects, and community events before eventually serving as a way to stress-test the network for Whisk (Protocol 23) and becoming a base project for the composability track at HackMeridian 2025.
At first glance, KALE is a quirky onchain activity designed to engage the community in something fun. However, its impact runs much deeper, with lessons, statistics, and ripple effects that extend far beyond the game. We’ll dive into those benefits in a moment. But first, let’s embark upon a brief history of the rise of KALE.
KALE: the beginning
The story of KALE began on November 9, 2024, when Tyler deployed the KALE smart contract, published the GitHub repo, and minted the first KALE. The project quickly captured the community’s attention, and by November 12, KALE had already become one of the most active smart contracts on Stellar alongside FCM (keep in mind, at this point, smart contracts had only been live on the Stellar Mainnet for a few months).
A dedicated KALE forum was started by the community in the Stellar Global Discord, where farmers talked strategy and shared miner builds. On November 15, the first chapter of the KALE lore was published (by yours truly), where our favorite leafy green carried extremely high stakes for the whole universe. Soon after, community powerhouse Frederic Rezeau released a C++ farmer (complete with a video tutorial), while Tyler dropped a Rust farmer, and debates broke out over GPU versus CPU efficiency.
On November 22, Tyler rolled out the KALE web application, a simple interface that enabled non-technical users to get involved in farming. The app, eventually hosted at kalefarm.xyz became a hub where users could farm KALE through smart contract accounts (C-addresses). It leveraged tools like Launchtube (a gasless smart contract transaction submission service) and Passkey Kit to provide a seamless user experience. There were now two ways to get involved: you could run your own farmer or compete through the browser-based app, making KALE more accessible and farming more competitive.
By November 26, Tyler had created the first KALE leaderboard, and just three days later, KALE had crossed 100,000 contract invocations, proving its growing popularity. Around December, the community began a more serious debate: what could you actually do with your KALE (dubbed “Kaletility”)?
Out of those early Kaletility conversations grew Kalefail, a spinoff launched in January 2025 by SDF’s ElliotFriend. Kalefail leaned into experimentation, riffing on the original’s success with fast-moving, scrappy ideas. Kalefail consists of the Trading Post, where KALE can be swapped 1:1 for other veggie tokens; the Kitchen, which lets farmers mint veggie-themed NFTs; and finally, the Tractor, a tool for reclaiming missed KALE harvests.
By January 2025, KALE had stopped being just Tyler’s project and had become more of a community-driven phenomenon, proving that a little on-chain fun can be the catalyst for massive engagement. The data speaks for itself: charts comparing Stellar activity “with KALE” versus “without KALE” reveal just how much it contributed to smart contract traffic on the network. With the release of the final chapter of KALE: Book One (read it here), the project had cemented its place in Stellar history.
Without KALE:
With KALE:
The explosion of Kaletility
KALE activity began to cool around this time, but the project quickly bounced back with even more Kaletility following a late-February community meeting. In March, Tyler pushed a major contract upgrade: emissions were increased from 5 KALE every five minutes to 5,000, accompanied by a 1,000x disbursement to existing holders. To keep things balanced, the upgrade also introduced a 5% emissions decay every 30 days, ensuring that new farmers could earn meaningful rewards while also benefiting early adopters.
The ecosystem around KALE continued to expand following the upgrade. A dedicated Discord channel opened in Stellar Global, and on March 6, community member jayrome, along with other ecosystem members, launched a KALE liquidity pool on StellarX. To encourage participation, jayrome rewarded those who donated to the pool with special Discord roles: Seed Sower (a donation of 20-500 KALE), Farm Hand (a donation of 500-4,000 KALE), and Master Farmer (a donation of 4,000+ KALE). Soon after, Soroswap listed KALE, adding even more utility and activity hit a new high: on March 25, KALE crossed 300,000 invocations in a single day.
KALE’s impact was summed up well by community member vinamo:
KALE showcases just how much is possible on Stellar, even with something as ‘silly’ as proof of work. It doubles as a coding challenge to build a miner, a hands-on tutorial with real Mainnet interaction, and a leaderboard that adds friendly competition. More than that, it creates a sandbox where you can experiment without pressure and enjoy the freedom to fail for free.
-vinamo
Futurenet controlled burn
Kaletility grew even more when the Stellar Core team at SDF approached Tyler, asking to run a KALE farming event on Futurenet to stress-test the network before Whisk (Protocol 23) went live on Mainnet. Whisk introduced massive changes to Stellar, including parallel transaction processing, in-memory state, and unified events, which took a ton of engineering effort and made it the most complex upgrade since Protocol 20.
Tyler rallied the community, challenging them to farm as much Futurenet KALE as possible over the course of 24 hours. At stake was a significant prize pool of Mainnet KALE for the top performers.
The event generated approximately 150,000 transactions: 94,000 from G-addresses (GPU and CPU miners) and 68,000 from C-addresses (the web application), with 4.7 million total KALE distributed to the participating accounts. While Futurenet invocations were smaller than Mainnet’s typical daily activity (150k versus 1M over the course of the day), the experience still gave SDF’s engineering team valuable insights. As Dima, a Stellar Core engineer, put it:
The event successfully triggered multi-threaded logic by reducing the per-ledger instruction limit, and we confirmed that nothing breaks under real traffic and parallel apply, which is a strong signal. We also uncovered some monitoring issues we’ll need to address before moving forward.
-Dima
KALE & composability
In August 2025, jayrome, along with other community members, Raph, and boxy, organized virtual mini-hackathons, with KALE serving as one of the foundational projects to test composability as a hackathon track ahead of HackMeridian. Composability, the idea that developers can build new applications by combining or extending components of existing ones, was a natural fit for KALE, as so many side projects had already been organically built around it.
During the KALE and Reflector mini-hackathon, developers created projects that layered on top of KALE and Reflector (a Stellar oracle) in various ways. Standouts included:
Kale Farmers Market: a 3D metaverse hub where each stall showcases a KALE project, one of which being a prediction market powered by KALE and Reflector.
Not Circle of Trust: a social game inspired by Reddit’s April Fools experiment, where KALE farming pools test loyalty and betrayal dynamics.
KALE Grab Rush: a fast-paced desktop browser arcade on Stellar where players can play, submit their scores, and climb the global leaderboard.
The mini-hackathon experiments paved the way for KALE to be included as a core composability project at HackMeridian 2025 in Rio de Janeiro. There, more than 500 hackers were challenged to build on top of existing ecosystem projects, and KALE’s presence there demonstrated its impact on the ecosystem.
Why onchain fun matters on Stellar
The history of KALE has now reached the present day. So let's switch gears from storytelling to discussing why things like KALE are so great for the ecosystem and the network.
At face value, projects like KALE might seem like distractions from SDF's mission of creating equitable access to the world's financial infrastructure. But these experiments play a huge role in strengthening the network, surfacing needs, and attracting talent. Here is why things like KALE are so important:
Games help improve the developer and user experience. Since inception, blockchain has struggled with poor UX. Experiences like the KALE web application are made possible by tools such as the Passkey Kit, smart wallets, and Launchtube. Many of these tools emerged directly from experiments with playful projects. What begins as a game can often shape the infrastructure that makes real-world applications usable.
Games are safe spaces to test the network. If a game goes down or breaks, the stakes are not high. But when a financial application breaks, the consequences can be catastrophic. KALE and other experimental apps give us the ability to stress-test the network in a low-stakes environment, surfacing bugs and performance issues before they affect production-grade systems. KALE has been the largest stress test for smart contracts on Stellar so far, even uncovering protocol-level issues like Blend invocations being bumped by KALE traffic. These lessons ultimately make the network stronger and more resilient.
Games attract and retain valuable ecosystem members. Even before smart contracts, SDF’s DevRel team leveraged games like Stellar Quest and RPCiege to onboard developers through puzzles and competition. Those classic experiences helped engage some of the most impactful contributors in today’s ecosystem, including builders like Tdep (author of CAP-0053: Separate host functions to extend the TTL for contract instance and contract code), Enrique (xBull, Stellar Wallets Kit, fxDAO), Ultra Stellar (LOBSTR, StellarX), Script3 (Blend, Soroban Governor, DeFindex), The Aha Company (Stellar CLI), and SDF’s own ElliotFriend (Senior Developer Advocate). These individuals and teams are proof that on-chain fun can be the first step toward lasting engagement.
Resources & outro
We’re nearly a year out from KALE’s inception, and it remains an extremely active project on the Stellar network. In August, Stellar Mainnet surpassed 100 million successful smart contract transactions, and that milestone happened to be a KALE plant invocation.
KALE shows that experimentation and fun have an important place alongside financial services: they spark creativity, surface technical gaps, and show what can happen when a community rallies around a shared on-chain experiment.
There were a lot of links throughout this journey, so let me break down the most important:
KALE’s story is still unfolding, so keep your eyes peeled for more and join the conversation in Discord to be part of what comes next!