The Stellar Anchor Platform: Connecting to Stellar Made Simple

During this year’s Meridian conference in Rome, SDF announced the launch of the Stellar Anchor Platform, a new product built to reduce development time and cost for fintechs integrating into the Stellar network.

The Anchor Platform, built and supported by SDF product and engineering teams, is the result of years of experience supporting our partners’ anchor integrations and implementing their feedback. Our latest product will lower the barrier to entry to accessing the network by offering a prepackaged platform that translates a business’s existing API structures into SEP-compliant interfaces. Instead of needing to build a parallel set of interfaces to support Stellar-enabled services, partners can deploy and integrate the Anchor Platform into their existing interfaces; adding Stellar support is now the same as integrating a new consumer of their existing APIs.

With the Anchor Platform, anchors don’t need an exhaustive understanding of Stellar Ecosystem Protocols (SEPs) to offer their existing services to the rest of the Stellar network. Instead, the Anchor Platform abstracts from Stellar-specific functionality so that banks, exchanges, money transfer operators, and more can easily connect to the network and access as many Stellar-supported payment capabilities as they’d like. By taking advantage of the anchor's existing interfaces, partners can focus on building their core business and less on getting integrated or maintaining and supporting separate interfaces.

Prior to the Meridian announcement, we had the opportunity to witness the Anchor Platform in action. After completing the production-ready version of the Platform earlier this year, we decided to trial it with two of our ecosystem companies: Bitso, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Latin America, and Red Chapina, a leading money transfer operator based in Guatemala.

Both partners were interested in bridging to send-side cross-border payments companies, and supporting receive-side transactions for their users. Additionally, they understood that by connecting to the Anchor Platform, they’d gain access to a network of interoperable wallets and exchanges, and by extension, prospective customers already transacting on the Stellar network. By using the Anchor Platform, both were able to leverage their existing infrastructure to deploy the platform and integrate it into their existing APIs to allow new Stellar-enabled customers to utilize their services over the SEP-31 protocol for cross-border payments.

The feedback that Bitso, Red Chapina, and future users provide us will prove invaluable in polishing the Anchor Platform to a high shine. While the Anchor Platform currently supports receive-side cross-border payments, it will continue to evolve in tandem with the ecosystem’s needs. As part of our upcoming roadmap, we plan to add functionality for new payment services such as send-side cross-border payments and deposits & withdrawals.

To keep up to date with the latest additions to the Anchor Platform and the steps to get integrated, visit stellar.org/products-and-tools/anchor-platform.