End of Year 2025 Report – Execution at Scale

For years, we've said that financial services is blockchain's killer use case — and that Stellar was purpose-built to serve it. In 2025, the market caught up. Regulation got clearer, institutional confidence grew, and partners moved from pilots to production. The result? A year that validated everything this network was designed to do: move real value, for real institutions, at real scale.

We just published our End of Year report, and here's a look at the highlights.

Stellar processed 3.6 billion transactions in 2025 alone, bringing lifetime operations to 21.5 billion. The network maintained 99.99% uptime while keeping the average fee per operation at roughly $0.0007. By year's end, Stellar had reached 10.3 million unique addresses — a network operating at scale with the reliability, performance, and cost structure that global financial infrastructure demands.

Monthly active addresses hit 632,000, up 24% year over year. Total value locked ended the year at $173 million, a 127% increase. And onchain real-world assets reached $785 million — up 158% — before crossing the $1 billion mark in the first week of January 2026.

The proof of Stellar's positioning as the blockchain for financial services is in who's building on it.

Franklin Templeton issued over $580 million in tokenized U.S. Treasuries on Stellar, with 85% year-over-year growth in Benji. U.S. Bank became the only major U.S. bank to publicly announce testing on open blockchain infrastructure. PayPal brought PYUSD to Stellar — now the 4th largest USD stablecoin by market cap and the 3rd largest by number of holders extending PayPal's stablecoin infrastructure onto a payments-optimized public blockchain. And RedSwan issued and transacted over $100 million in institutional-grade commercial real estate on the network, extending tokenization beyond treasuries and into core asset classes.

Payment volume on Stellar hit $55.6 billion, up 52% year over year — spanning remittances, commerce, and public-sector rails.

MoneyGram launched a stablecoin-powered mobile app with Crossmint, starting in Colombia and designed to scale across major remittance corridors including Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines. Visa and Wirex are settling card transactions onchain in USDC and EURC, with Visa's stablecoin settlement now at a roughly $4.6 billion run rate across all chains.

And in one of the most compelling deployments of the year, the Republic of the Marshall Islands launched the world's first onchain distribution of universal basic income, with more than $1.3 billion distributed using a digitally native sovereign instrument backed by U.S. Treasury bills.

In September, Stellar shipped Whisk — the largest protocol upgrade since smart contracts. Parallel transaction execution, Soroban state caching, and unified asset events pushed theoretical max throughput to 3,000 TPS. The most recent configuration change, SLP4, doubled most of Soroban's ledger limits and reduced costs for non-refundable resources by up to 4x, delivering a 70% cost reduction in smart contract invocations.

On the privacy front, X-Ray went live on mainnet, making Stellar the most comprehensive L1 for zero-knowledge cryptography. With BN254 elliptic curve integration, built-in Poseidon and Poseidon2 hash functions, and configurable compliance features, developers can build privacy-preserving applications with selective disclosure — exactly what enterprises need.

Over three years, the Stellar developer community grew 171% — significantly outpacing the broader industry, which saw a decline in total developers over the same period. HackMeridian in Brazil drew hundreds of builders and over 100 project submissions. The first Stellar Builder Summit at Consensus in Toronto convened more than 100 developers working on payments, DeFi, and asset infrastructure. By year's end, more than 8,000 new builders engaged through events, workshops, and hackathons worldwide.

Everything in 2026 is organized around three strategic priorities: accelerating asset adoption and cross-border use, enabling seamless enterprise and institutional adoption, and advancing core network capabilities.

We've also updated our mandate framework to align resources accordingly — from Stellar Growth (developer programs, the Enterprise Fund, and adoption initiatives) to a new Assets and Liquidity fund focused on getting stablecoins and tokenized assets moving on the network. And we're keeping an eye on what's next: agentic payments via x402, post-quantum security, and continued infrastructure investment to support the next wave of scale.

The takeaway from 2025 is clear: financial services are the use case, and Stellar is delivering. From payments at scale, to new asset classes, to the partners enabling the next phase of growth — this is what Stellar was built for.