Bringing Stellar to the Regions That Matter

Adoption is the work.

Stellar is a global network, but the institutions, builders, and applications that turn it into real financial infrastructure are local. They operate under local regulators, settle through local rails, and serve customers in specific markets with specific needs. Bringing those institutions and builders onto Stellar, and then helping them grow, is how the network compounds.

That is what our growth strategy is built around. And it is why we have spent the last six months standing up a Market Development team with senior leadership in the regions where the next phase of Stellar adoption will be won.

The thesis is simple. The institutions we want building on Stellar—banks, payment processors, asset issuers, fintechs, remittance providers—make their integration decisions locally. So do the developers who ship the applications that put Stellar in front of users. Winning their trust and their build cycles requires people on the ground who know the rails, know the regulators, know the competitive landscape, and can move at the speed those institutions move at.

A global campaign from afar cannot do that. A regional team with presence and permanence on the ground can.

It is also how Stellar's strengths translate into volume. The corridors that matter for cross-border payments run between specific countries. The instant-payment systems we connect to—SPEI in Mexico, PIX in Brazil, SEPA across Europe—are operated by specific institutions under specific regulators. The asset issuers and tokenization projects that will define the next several years of the Stellar network are being built inside specific regulatory regimes. Financial services and structures are not homogeneous across the world. Stellar wins by being the most credible, most accessible, and most useful infrastructure in that geography, and combining world-class technology with region-specific knowledge. That is a job that has to be done in market.

That is what this team is here to do.

Federico Gomez Schumacher leads Market Development across Latin America as Stellar Development Foundation's (SDF) Senior Director for the region. He brings over 20 years of experience in digital payments, most recently as VP for Latin America at PayPal, where he led the business across the region and previously served as General Manager for Brazil and Mexico.

LATAM is one of the deepest commercial markets for Stellar, with active anchors, asset issuers, and remittance partners across Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and beyond. Federico's mandate is to convert that footprint into the next layer of institutional adoption: more anchors, more regulated stablecoin issuance, more enterprise distribution partners moving real volume through Stellar rails.

Cláudia Antunes joined SDF in March as Director, Market Development Brazil, reporting to Federico.

Brazil earned its own leader. PIX, a fully digitized banking sector, and one of the most active fintech markets in the region make it a standalone adoption opportunity, with institutional buyers ready to engage on tokenization, stablecoin distribution, and B2B payment flows. Cláudia's focus is bringing those buyers onto Stellar.

Cláudia brings deep institutional experience, with over 17 years in traditional finance (banking), followed by work in the digital assets space since 2019. Her background includes a focus on tokenization at Mercado Bitcoin and Liqi Digital Assets, and Drex/CBDC/Stablecoins infrastructure development at Hamsa, involving close contact with the Central Bank and Brazilian commercial banks.

Juan Lopez Carretero leads Market Development Europe as SDF's Senior Director. He joined us from BBVA, where he led global partnerships and previously the team evaluating and executing the bank's fintech investments and acquisitions. He has also been a bank board member. That gives him a rare view: how major European banks actually engage with new financial infrastructure, what gates the conversation, and what unlocks it.

Europe is where some of the most consequential regulated stablecoin activity under MiCA and tokenization activity under related financial-services frameworks is happening, and Juan is leading the work of making Stellar the network of choice for the institutions building under those regimes.

Kwame Oppong serves as Senior Adviser for Africa. He spent six years as Director of FinTech and Innovation at the Bank of Ghana, where he led the eCedi CBDC pilot, built the regulatory sandbox, and helped Ghana reach #1 globally on the GSMA mobile money regulatory index. He came to that role after years at CGAP within the World Bank Group, and earlier leadership roles in mobile money and telecoms across the continent.

The African opportunity is significant: high mobile money penetration, expensive remittance corridors, and a builder base growing faster than almost anywhere else. Kwame's role is to engage African financial institutions, policymakers, and developers, bringing them into the Stellar ecosystem in a way that builds durably, not transactionally.

Faraj Abutalibov serves as Senior Adviser for the Middle East and is based in Dubai. He brings over 19 years of experience across energy, fintech, blockchain, venture capital, and institutional business development. He is the founder of Crypto Executives, a community of more than 2,500 C-level digital asset and fintech leaders concentrated across the Middle East and globally, and brings a deep network into the institutional capital, infrastructure, and policy circles shaping the region's regulated digital asset market.

The Middle East has moved faster than almost any other region on regulatory frameworks for digital assets, particularly across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and has become a meaningful hub for institutional capital deployment and tokenized asset issuance. Faraj's role is to position Stellar inside that flow.

Betty Sun-Lucas leads Market Development for APAC as SDF's Regional Director, based in Singapore. She brings fifteen years of experience at the intersection of fintech, policy, and investment across Southeast Asia—most recently as Regional Director for Fintech at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, where she helped build trade and investment flows between APAC and Australia and worked closely with regulators, founders, and institutional capital across the region.

APAC holds some of the largest cross-border payment corridors in the world, the deepest pools of stablecoin demand outside the US, and a regulatory landscape that increasingly rewards networks operating with discipline.

Stellar is at a pivotal moment for adoption. The largest asset managers in the world are now issuing tokenized funds on public networks. Stablecoins are becoming primary financial infrastructure. Major institutions are no longer asking whether to operate on public blockchain rails, but which ones. Developers are choosing networks based on which ones have the anchors, the tooling, and the local presence to support what they are building.

Winning that decision, in market after market, is the team's mandate. It requires people who can sit across the table from a bank's head of payments, a regulator's fintech lead, or a founder choosing where to build, and represent Stellar with the credibility and context the conversation demands.

Distribution is the next battlefield, and it requires local knowledge and sustained presence. This team is how we show up for it.

I am excited to have them, and I am looking forward to what they unlock.