Stellar Development Foundation Q1 2023 in Review

The first quarter of 2023 flew by, and the Stellar Development Foundation made significant strides on its roadmap to further its strategy: utility is the growth exponent. To that end, SDF delivered on the three building blocks: make innovation easy and scalable, win over builders, and focus on utility to build trust.

Our Q1 report outlines what SDF has accomplished, measured against the three building blocks. Highlights include:

• Soroban development continues to be a top priority, and each quarter brings SDF closer to mainnet launch. Some of the noteworthy achievements in Q1 include 2 key preview releases. Preview Release 7 introduced “Soroban Auth”, a novel approach for creating smart wallets through account abstraction, whereas Preview Release 8 completed a type overhaul in preparation for launch.
• Technical improvements to Stellar Core in Q1 have laid the groundwork for improving scaling and decentralization. Two initiatives include BucketlistDB, a new storage mechanism that will use one data structure (instead of the primary and secondary structures that the network has today), and Pull Mode, the new initiative to increase the network’s transactions per second.
• The Freighter team was hard at work this quarter, supporting Soroban, tested the SEP-24 integration with MoneyGram Access, and added additional metric tracking capabilities.
• As part of the Soroban Adoption Fund – – a dedicated $100 million dollar envelope within the organization’s mandate to support developer adoption of Soroban – the Soroban Adoption Fund Programs officially launched and received significant promotion.
• This quarter, SDF launched the Stellar Asset Sandbox, a suite of tools to help asset issuers get familiar with Stellar and easily make the assessment on how Stellar can support their projects. SDF also released a step-by-step guidebook about Asset Issuance on Stellar.
• To increase Stellar's reach to the cash economy in the US, SDF partnered with Coinme this quarter to offer USDC on Stellar through the Coinme wallet and Coinme’s global cash on/off ramp ecosystem. As of March, through thousands of locations on Coinme’s network nationwide (including ATMs and Coinstar kiosks) users can buy and sell USDC on Stellar using cash and debit cards.
• SDF doubled down on event presence this quarter. A team including Denelle, policy, and product leaders from SDF started in Davos for the World Economic Forum, while Justin and representatives from our crypto strategy, policy, and investments teams were present at the European Blockchain Convention.
• SDF participated at ETHDenver in panels and ran Soroban workshops, also swinging through Axelar’s Interop Summit.
• Then it was off to Paris Blockchain Week Summit where SDF had a big activation, as well as the DC Blockchain Summit, Fintech Meetup in Vegas, and back to SF for Canvas 2023.
• SDF COO Jason Chilpala was selected to become a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Global Markets Advisory Committee, bringing a unique perspective as the only member representing a Layer 1 protocol in the group.
• SDF’s policy priorities for the year ahead are now available on the SDF blog.

‍Read the Q1 report to learn more about these highlights and other strategic achievements from this quarter. You can also watch the Q1-in-review webinar below, where Denelle Dixon (SDF CEO and Executive Director) was joined by Justin Rice (VP of Ecosystem) and Candace Kelly (Chief Legal Officer) to cover growth metrics for the Stellar network and other highlights and accomplishments from the first quarter of 2023.