Canada’s biggest crypto exchange Coinsquare has acquired StellarX. The acquisition from Interstellar by Coinsquare was driven by a need for “a home with regulatory experience”. Coinsquare has quickly become a Stellar powerhouse, having already acquired Stellar wallet BlockEQ. On the roadmap: a StellarX mobile app, new fiat tethers, and securities tokens.
Jesse Lund of IBM talks CBDCs with Pompliano and predicts that a retail CBDC will be issued in the next 1-2 years by a central bank that is not one of the big 5, but pegs its currency to one of the big 5 currencies.
Celsius has added lumens, allowing you to earn 3% interest on lumen deposits.
Jem Mawson of the Stellar Scala SDK has released 0rora - a Stellar payment manager. It’s a “self-hosted solution for easily making, scheduling, editing and responding to Stellar payments.”
In CAP-0018 (an alternative to CAP-0016’s cosigned assets), Jonathan Jove suggests a new approach to giving asset issuers more control over their assets. This CAP would add a new flag to trustlines that “offers a level of authorization intermediate between unauthorized and fully authorized.” This new flag would allow an issuer to maintain control over who can send and receive payments using their asset while at the same time allow asset holders to maintain offers.
Stronghold has opened up their anchored USD stablecoin to retail customers and released an updated DEX UI. On their DEX UI, they will differentiate themselves by only listing certain assets that meet specific criteria.
Europe’s largest digital publishing house Axel Springer (Business Insider, Bild, Die Welt and Upday) is piloting the SatoshiPay wallet to power Stellar-based micropayments for content.
McCaleb pens an update about SDF lumen sales, inflation, Starlight, and SDF's general plans.
Sergey Nebolsin and Viktor Sokolov of Evil Martians describe how to implement web authentication with Stellar, JavaScript, and Node.js based on SEP-0010.
Announcing the full Stellar Overview Course! Understand Stellar in 30 minutes by watching our free, six-part, animated video course.
Stellarport now supports Trezor hardware devices, allowing you to send payments and trade on the Stellar DEX with your Trezor. Stellarport plans to open source their Trezor integration work so other developers can add Trezor support.
Because Stellar is intended to be securities-friendly, some asset issuers need additional levels of control over their assets beyond authorizing asset holders. Some issuers are spinning up solutions that require them to be co-signers on asset holders’ accounts (see SEP-0008), preventing holders from maintaining full custody of other, unregulated assets. “Cosigned Assets” is a draft CAP by David Mazières that attempts to address this issue by requiring cosigning of transactions that involve a “cosigner authorized” asset without requiring the asset issuer to also be a cosigner on the holder’s account.
Rehive - a provider of fintech solutions built on Stellar - describes the benefits of tokenizing vouchers and gift cards on Stellar, including:
Smartlands announced an upcoming wallet that will allow for holding and trading securities on Stellar in a compliant way.
According Diar, “0.02% of circulating Stellar Lumens have ended up in a trust launched by institutional-geared cryptocurrency firm Grayscale.”
Keybase has expanded from cryptocommunication into cryptocurrency by incorporating Stellar into their suite of apps (no official announcement yet). They now provide:
Download the updated apps and try it out. Keybase supports federation, so your Stellar address can be represented by your Keybase username*keybase.io.
Grayscale (subsidiary of Digital Currency Group) has added a trust that allows investors to gain exposure to lumens.
SatoshiPay released Solar Wallet - a desktop wallet with asset management and multi-sig support.
SDF is creating technical roadmaps for all of their projects this year, and they are looking looking for feedback on Horizon. If you've used Horizon extensively in the past, please fill out this survey.
LongHash - a blockchain data analysis firm - studied accounts on the Stellar network to identify the best recipient accounts for a theoretical airdrop. Their analysis indicates that 87% of accounts on the network have less than 10 lumens, and 9.76% of accounts performed 10 or more transactions in the past month. While the research is interesting, airdropping projects cannot target accounts in this way due to the need for trustlines and the related increase in the minimum account balance.
New Kelp - an open-source trading bot for the Stellar DEX - updates:
SatoshiPay - a micropayments provider - has been operating basic validators for over a year and recently launched a cluster of three full validators in Iowa, Frankfurt, and Singapore. A basic validator participates in consensus but does not store the full history of the network, while a full validator both participates in consensus and stores the full network history. A full validator helps other nodes join the network and improves the resiliency of the network. According to SatoshiPay, they join three full validators from SDF, two from Coinqvest, and two from Lobstr.
According to a survey of central banks by the Bank for International Settlements, a majority of central banks are researching CBDCs (central bank digital currencies), but "only a few intend to issue a CBDC in the short to medium term." The report focuses in on two countries where the circulating cash supply has decreased - Sweden and Uruguay - and their respective general purpose CBDCs - the e-Krona and the e-Peso.
Note: These are not on the Stellar network.
Lindsay X. Lin, Legal Counsel at Interstellar and the Stellar Development Foundation, lays out the the technical differences between different decentralized exchanges (0x, Stellar DEX, IDEX, EtherDelta, Bancor, Airswap, etc.) in an explanatory overview of decentralized exchange architecture for the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy.
After SDF announced wallet guidelines, Soneso - the creators of the iOS and macOS Stellar SDK - analyzed the guidelines adherence of the 17 wallets listed on Stellar.org. According to their study, no listed wallets follow guideline #13: “Wallet must verify and present information to the user based on the issuing account's TOML file (SEP-0001).”
