Stellar Development Foundation Q3 2022 in Review

It’s halfway through the year, and the Stellar Development Foundation is making steady progress on its 2022 roadmap, delivering on the three building blocks: increase scalability and network innovation, activate more network participation, and demand and promote inclusion.

Our Q3 report outlines what SDF has accomplished, measured against the three building blocks. Highlights include:

• Smart contracts continued to be a high priority for SDF, with Q3 largely focusing on getting Soroban ready to launch, which Tomer Weller (VP of Tech Strategy, SDF) announced is now live on futurenet at Meridian 2022.
• In his latest blog post, Tomer provides the rationale behind the design of Soroban, a new smart contracts standard, citing scalability, batteries-included functionality, and reliable access to financial rails as top priorities for the development of this new technology.
• To encourage building on Soroban, SDF has also announced a $100M adoption fund, with the first incentive program, Sorobonathon: First Light, rewarding eligible devs for testing Soroban and sharing their feedback through content including code examples, tutorials, and Github issues.
• In Q3, SDF planned for its annual marquee event, Meridian 2022, which took place in Rome, Italy from October 11 to 13. The event featured over 100 speakers across more than 45 sessions and 3 stages, with more than 380+ people attending.
• A total of $12M was split across three Enterprise Fund investments in Q3, the recipients being Wave, Securrency, and DFS Lab, in addition to $500k for a Matching Fund investment in African fintech Stax.
• Denelle Dixon (CEO, SDF) testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry on the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act – bipartisan legislation created to empower the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as the authority to oversee digital commodities.
• Leading fintech Novatti announced its Australian Dollar (AUD) stablecoin on Stellar will go live Nov. 1. AUDD will be available for a direct 1:1 swap of fiat Australian Dollars via their onsite platform and app.
• Anke Liu (SCF Program Manager, SDF) wrote a blog post detailing the extensive history of the Stellar Community Fund. Highlighting the lessons learned from past rounds, SCF strived to make the whole experience more inclusive and accessible for its 11th round. Kicking the round off in August, SCF is running a startup bootcamp in conjunction with accelerator DFS Lab for a select group from the first wave of applicants. SCF also released a newly redesigned website, launching a handbook to serve as the source-of-truth for the program.
• Gamified coding experience Stellar Quest recently came out with a newly redesigned website and several updates, including: the final and most difficult level of its Learn content, new XLM rewards for completing each level of Stellar Quest Learn, and reduced onboarding friction, with an introductory Pioneer Quest to reduce drop-off at the very beginning.
• SDF released the Blockchain Sustainability Report, developed by PricewaterhouseCoopers US. SDF also engineered a social media campaign, joined by over 10 ecosystem companies, in addition to holding a live Twitter Spaces event with Litemint & Blue Marble and a LinkedIn Live event with Wyre.‍
• The first version of the Stellar Anchor Platform has launched and is available for use. The Anchor Platform aims to help increase adoption by increasing the growth of the Stellar anchor network, both in terms of the number of anchors and number of integrations with those anchors. It is currently in final testing with 2 new Stellar anchors who participated in the early access program.
• SDF continued to expand and tell the story of how Stellar enables applications to connect to a global network of on and off ramps provided by Stellar anchors. SDF released this video, which encapsulates the power of Stellar Ramps, such as those offered by Moneygram. SDF also produced an overview of Moneygram Access, hosted a webinar with SDF and Moneygram representatives and launched a dedicated Stellar On/Off Ramps page + blog, highlighting the use case.

‍‍Read the Q3 report to learn more about these highlights and other strategic achievements from this quarter. You can also watch the Q3-in-review webinar below, where Denelle Dixon (SDF CEO and Executive Director) was joined by Justin Rice (VP of Ecosystem) and Lauren Thorbjornsen (Chief of Staff, VP of Communications) to cover growth metrics for the Stellar network and other highlights and accomplishments from the third quarter of 2022.