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Monthly RoundUp
I can’t believe we are already in December. This year has been filled with tremendous wins and a lot of hard work, which has created a long but fruitful “to-do list” as we close it out.
November was a whirlwind. And, I’m pleased that Meridian 2021 went off without a hitch, with two days filled with fascinating discussions and riveting panels. It was really fun joining all of you in the chat, and I’m looking forward to more opportunities in the future where we can hang out together (hopefully in person)! If you weren’t able to attend Meridian this year, no worries – check out our recap blog for our favorite highlights or watch the content on-demand (general sessions, tech talks, demos) on our YouTube channel.
During Meridian, we also announced that MoneyGram International has launched its Friends and Family pilot on Stellar. Pilot participants can now deposit cash into their digital wallets at participating MoneyGram locations and send payments internationally via Stellar USDC, while also being able to exchange Stellar USDC for any cash currency supported on the MoneyGram platform. This pilot signifies a huge milestone, since MoneyGram is well on its way to offer their millions of users a local fiat entry into blockchain, providing those in emerging markets easier access to digital assets than ever before. Stay tuned for news on the service’s full launch in 2022 – that’s soon!
To wrap up the year, I’ll be writing up an overview of Stellar’s growth and SDF’s accomplishments throughout 2021, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the next few weeks.
2021 has been a phenomenal year and 2022 promises even more. I’m excited about where we are headed.
As the year winds down, my wish for each of you is health, happiness and some much deserved down time with family, good friends — and even time for yourself.
denelle
CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), Denelle Dixon, will testify December 8 at the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. As cryptocurrencies, central bank digital currencies and other digital assets enter the mainstream, the Committee will look at how digital assets have begun to enter many aspects of our lives – from payments to investments to remittances – and consider how to devise legislation to support responsible innovation that protects consumers and investors while promoting greater financial inclusion.
And just like that, Meridian 2021 is over. Members of SDF and the Stellar ecosystem reunited for our third annual conference and biggest event of the year, and it did not disappoint – we celebrated some big milestones, engaged in lively discussions, and left more resolved than ever to tackle the challenge of creating equitable access to the world’s financial systems.
MoneyGram and SDF have hit the first major milestone in the partnership by launching a live cash-in and cash-out pilot in the U.S. Pilot participants can now deposit cash into their digital wallets at participating MoneyGram locations and send payments internationally via Stellar USDC. The pilot also lets participants exchange Stellar USDC for any cash currency supported on the MoneyGram platform.
Leaders from SDF recap growth and accomplishments in 2021. This discussion covers milestones from the past year and a Q&A with members of the SDF team.
Dive into the story of SDF’s Enterprise Fund, Stellar’s strategic ecosystem fund, and learn about its impact on the Stellar network and beyond. Hear directly from Fund recipients on the value of raising money from a strategic investor and how they’re using Stellar to grow their impact in emerging markets.
Get inspired by the real-world impact of the Stellar Community Fund projects, made possible by the ingenuity, engagement, and support from our community. These are local builders having a broad-based impact.
Stellar is one of the earliest layer 1 blockchains to incorporate AMM functionality at the protocol level, enabling developers to integrate and offer exciting user-facing services that let users create and deposit into liquidity pools on the network. In this panel discussion, you will learn how AMMs on Stellar enable cheaper, faster, and highly usable cross-asset payments, and democratize and open up access to liquidity provision.
A lot has changed in the Stellar ecosystem and broader industry over the past year. Join SDF’s Denelle Dixon and Jed McCaleb for a no-limits conversation on the past, present, and future of Stellar.
Around the world, lawmakers are paying an increasing amount of attention to digital assets and finance, resulting in a wide range of regulatory approaches and actions. Four experts join SDF to discuss the very different regulatory landscapes in the United States, El Salvador, Ukraine, and Nigeria.
CBDCs and stablecoins—and the tension between them—have come into the mainstream conversation in full force this past year. What is the future of digital currency? This debate touches on what makes a trusted global currency, stablecoins’ and CBDCs’ roles in the evolution of money, and more.
Companies within the Stellar ecosystem debate a range of topics related to how we’re seeing the Stellar network expand. This discussion touches on how payments are evolving on Stellar, the primacy of payments vs other use cases, impacts of AMMs on Stellar, the importance of scalability, and more.
This year catapulted blockchain and crypto into the mainstream. We’re entering a new phase of our work, with enormous possibility and uncertainty ahead. This debate covers industry-wide predictions for 2022, touching on topics including market movements, liquidity, crypto’s impact on financial inclusion, and more.
Tomer Weller, SDF’s VP of Tech Strategy, looks at technical developments from 2021 and gives a vision of the future for Stellar. Building on recent advances in interoperability and cooperation by trusted parties, Tomer outlines key directions for Stellar’s expanded reach including scale, bridging, and DeFi initiatives.
We closed Meridian 2021 by sharing the Stellar Development Foundation’s 2022 roadmap. Join Denelle Dixon for a peek at SDFs goals for the coming year.
SPEEDEX – a Scalable, Parallelizable, and Economically Efficient Distributed Exchange – is a new design for a fully on-chain decentralized exchange that can scale to an arbitrarily high transaction throughput. Current on-chain decentralized exchanges are slow, expensive, and inefficient. SPEEDEX, by contrast, is none of these; it can scale its throughput by effectively using many CPU cores, and, at the same time, SPEEDEX eliminates risk-free front-running, gives every user the same, fair exchange rate, and boosts liquidity between illiquid trading pairs.
Tired of high, unpredictable Eth gas fees? You’re not alone. The speed and low cost of minting on Stellar has drawn several artists from other blockchains to begin minting their work on
litemint.com instead. Learn more about NFTs in the Stellar ecosystem.
This year, we’ve gotten great feedback on Meridian 2021’s tech talks – and they’re now available on demand for your viewing pleasure. Hear directly from SDF’s Engineering team on what we’ve been building and how you can leverage these advancements for your work.
What would it take to integrate a SPEEDEX module into Stellar-core? And how does that SPEEDEX module actually work? Geoff Ramseyer explains why integrating SPEEDEX with stellar would require three main changes.
Justin Rice (SDF) on The Blockchain.com Podcast
Aurora Park, Legal Operations Associate
Aurora is responsible for creating and implementing processes and procedures, and supporting SDF’s Legal Department. For the last 7 years, she worked in start-up software companies with her last 3 ½ years spent in the cryptocurrency industry, learning all things in the ever-changing crypto world. During that time she realized that the legal side of crypto was where her heart was and began her journey to become certified as a Paralegal, which she will complete in 2022.
Giuliano Losa, Senior Software Engineer
Giuliano is a senior software engineer working with the Stellar Core team on R&D projects with a focus on using formal methods to develop reliable distributed systems. Giuliano holds a PhD in computer science from EPFL and has held post-doctoral research positions at Virginia Tech and UCLA. Before joining the Stellar Development Foundation, he was a research engineer at Galois Inc.
Shawn Reuland, Senior Software Engineer
Shawn is responsible for contributing towards software design and development in SDF’s Horizon product within the Stellar network platform. His career in software began in the 1990s. He has enjoyed contributing to many projects and adapting as the industry evolved through mainframe, client-server, web, distributed computing.
Reminder: Beware of “Hard Fork” Scams, Impersonators, and “Giveaway Scams”. We will never ask for your private keys, and we will never ask you to send us cryptocurrency. Learn more about how to protect yourself and your accounts in our Security guide.
DISCLAIMER: Stellar.org does not endorse any third party organizations that are named in this and/or any other communication(s). Please conduct due diligence and interact with these organizations at your discretion.
Safety Policy: The Stellar team will NEVER ask you for your private keys. We will NEVER ask you to deposit funds to any wallet address. Read our Security Guide for more information.
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