Q1 2026: Execution at network scale

We've spent years building toward this moment.

In Q1, the Stellar network showed execution at network scale: assets growing, payments moving, institutions deploying, builders scaling, and infrastructure continuing to perform under real-world usage.

Adoption is accelerating across the network. The question is no longer whether onchain financial infrastructure will matter. The focus now is how quickly it becomes part of everyday financial systems.

Stellar continued to perform at the level institutions and developers require.

The network has now processed 22.5 billion total operations, maintained 99.99% uptime, and kept average fees at around one hundredth of a penny. Unique addresses reached 10.6 million.

Fast settlement, low fees, and proven reliability are the baseline for financial infrastructure that institutions can trust and builders can rely on.

The headline number in Q1 was tokenized real-world assets on Stellar.

Shortly after quarter-end, onchain RWAs crossed $2 billion, up from $785 million at year-end 2025. That is roughly 2.5x growth in a single quarter, driven by multiple issuers and a broadening set of asset classes.

The growth reflects a deeper trend: regulated financial products are increasingly being issued, held, and used on public blockchain infrastructure.

Payment volume reached $5.5 billion in Q1, an all-time high and up 72% year over year. Velocity increased 75% YoY.

Activity is broadening across the network, across corridors, and across use cases. That matters because payment volume alone does not define adoption. Repeat usage does.

In Q1, the network showed both scale and movement.

The institutions coming onto Stellar now are the kind of organizations that define market structure.

U.S. Bank, Amundi, Société Générale, AllUnity, and Kenanga, Malaysia’s leading independent investment bank, all advanced activity on or around the network this quarter. These are regulated issuers and distributors bringing regulated products onto public infrastructure.

Existing participants also continued to deepen their work across the ecosystem, including Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, MoneyGram, Etherfuse, and TopNod.

Validator nodes increased 13% since year-end, with growth across enterprise operators and independent contributors. Scale is measured by assets, and also by who is building, validating, and operating the system.

Distribution is building corridor by corridor.

In LATAM, the system is already operating under real conditions. More than $730 billion in crypto moved across the region in 2025, up 60% YoY, driven by practical demand for payments, stable value, and cross-border access.

In Europe, regulated issuance and institutional distribution are converging. AllUnity’s EURAU launched on Stellar mainnet in April. EUR-denominated stablecoin volume grew 12x year over year. Spiko’s EU T-Bill product grew from roughly $520 million to $970 million, with most of that growth on Stellar.

In APAC, institutional participation continues to grow. Kenanga launched the first tokenized money market funds in Malaysia on Stellar, and SDF is helping build institutional settlement infrastructure in Singapore with Marketnode, backed by SGX and Temasek.

Different regions have different entry points. The direction is consistent: assets are moving into real channels, and distribution is expanding market by market.

Stellar is now the fastest-growing developer ecosystem of any major chain, with 86% year-over-year growth in total developers, according to Electric Capital. The ecosystem is also top-five by absolute developer count, with 4,400+ developers engaged worldwide in Q1.

Over three years, the developer community has grown 171%.

That growth matters because developers are the layer that turns assets into products. Wallets, neobanks, payment products, treasury tools, FX corridors, privacy applications, and onchain markets bring these assets into users’ hands.

More assets attract more developers. More developers build more distribution. More distribution brings in more issuers. Each new participant increases the utility of every other participant on the same rails.

Stellar’s product and protocol work in Q1 focused on three areas: privacy, agentic payments, and security.

X-Ray, Stellar’s ZK primitive layer, is live. It gives builders the tools to create privacy-preserving applications while maintaining an open and auditable base layer. Real privacy applications are already emerging, including Nethermind’s Stellar Private Payments, Boundless, Arcane, and an ERC7984-compliant token standard in development with OpenZeppelin.

On agentic payments, Stellar shipped the x402 spec and SDK, and delivered a full MPP SDK within one week of Stripe and Tempo’s announcement. The first Stellar agentic payments hackathon drew 591 hackers and 288 submissions, making it the largest hackathon in Stellar’s history.

On security, Yardstick, Protocol 26, introduced CAP77 Quorum Freeze, giving validators a consensus-driven mechanism to rapidly contain compromised assets. As more regulated activity moves onchain, strong incident response becomes part of institutional-grade infrastructure.

Q1 made the trajectory clear.

Assets are growing. Payments are moving. Builders are shipping. Institutions are deploying. Infrastructure is keeping pace.

Everyday usage is becoming the baseline.

Join us at Meridian 2026 in Lisbon, October 28–29. The call for speakers is open.