Stellar Development Foundation Q2 2021 in Review

Halfway into 2021, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has gained invaluable experiences and learnings that will bolster its three strategic pillars: supporting the robustness and usability of Stellar, helping Stellar be the blockchain people know and trust, and fostering and developing sustainable Stellar use cases for cross-border payments and securitized assets.

Our Q2 report outlines what SDF has accomplished, measured against the three pillars. This quarter’s highlights include:

• On April 6, 2021, the Stellar Development Foundation’s validator nodes temporarily halted and its public Horizon API instance went down as a result. Despite this, Stellar remained online. Enough validators were available to securely process transactions and SDF’s engineering team spun up new nodes and brought a new Horizon instance online. Demonstrating the power of decentralization, the network continued operating as it was designed to do.
• SDF made two Enterprise Fund investments in Tribal Credit and Airtm for a total of $18 million in Q2. The Airtm investment of $15 million is our largest investment to date.
• Upon convening Ukranian financial institutions with blockchain and virtual assets experts, SDF accepted an invitation to become a member of the Association of Ukranian Banks. This new partnership reinforces SDF’s role as an advisor to Ukraine on deploying blockchain technology and virtual assets.
• Data shows Stellar’s positive trajectory towards usability and robustness. We have seen a Q2 YoY increase in total accounts (+20%), total payments (+160%), average daily DEX volume (+27%), and total operations processed (+173%). In addition, there was a 58% increase in relevant assets – assets tethered to a real financial instrument, like fiat or stocks – from Q2 2020 to Q2 2021. This accounted for an astounding 760% YoY growth in on-network transaction volume for these relevant assets.
• Two Protocol upgrades were implemented on Stellar. Protocol 16 helped all nodes affected by the April 6, 2021 incident to restore service. Protocol 17 introduced a new feature – asset clawback – to Stellar, designed to let businesses issuing regulated financial instruments comply with regulatory requirements by providing the ability to revoke assets in certain situations.
• After much discussion within the ecosystem regarding how to improve network liquidity on Stellar, CAP-38, a proposal to introduce Automated Market Makers (AMMs) to Stellar, was officially deemed ready for implementation as part of Protocol 18. If validators vote to accept the new protocol with CAP-38, users will be able to create liquidity pools – enabling cheaper, faster, and highly usable cross-asset payments and democratizing market making by giving everyone the ability to participate in liquidity provision.
• At the beginning of the quarter, the Stellar Community Fund Seed Round wrapped by awarding 8 projects a total of 5 million XLM, and in late June, a new SCF round opened, with over 40 projects having already applied.
• SDF continued to engage and grow the community by releasing Stellar Quest Series 3, surpassing all expectations with over 1,500 developers completing challenges.
  

‍Read the Q2 report to learn more about these highlights and other strategic achievements from this quarter. You can also watch the Q2-in-review webinar below, where Denelle Dixon, SDF CEO and Executive Director, was joined by Justin Rice, Head of Ecosystem, and Candace Kelly, General Counsel, to cover growth metrics for the Stellar network and other highlights and accomplishments since the beginning of the second quarter.

NOTE: During the quarterly call, we called attention to metrics regarding relevant asset transaction volume and growth. These numbers were incorrect and we have updated the Q2 report with the correct values.