2026-04-16
Protocol 26 "Yardstick" Hits Testnet
Protocol 26, codenamed Yardstick, went live on testnet on April 16, 2026 at 17:00 UTC — literally the day of this meeting. Mainnet validator votes are scheduled for May 6th. If you are running any kind of infrastructure on Stellar — nodes, SDKs, integrations — now is the time to pull the Protocol 26 changes, update your SDKs, and test against testnet before the mainnet vote. The #protocol-next channel in the Stellar developer Discord is where the ecosystem coordinates during upgrades.
Two CAPs shipped with this release:
CAP-81 rewrites the Soroban eviction scan. Instead of scanning the BucketList on disk, eviction now works directly from in-memory Soroban state. The result is faster evictions, fewer disk reads, and more efficient node operations. This is the kind of under-the-hood improvement that compounds as Soroban usage grows — less I/O overhead means the network handles growing state more gracefully at scale.
CAP-82 adds checked arithmetic variants for the existing 256-bit integer host functions. Where the current functions trap on overflow, the new checked variants return Void instead, letting contracts handle arithmetic errors explicitly and gracefully rather than panicking. If you're writing DeFi contracts — lending protocols, swap routers, pricing curves — this matters: checked arithmetic means operations fail explicitly and predictably instead of silently wrapping or trapping.
Ecosystem Snapshot: $2B in Tokenized Real-World Assets
Stellar has crossed $2 billion in tokenized real-world assets on the network — more than 4x growth in 12 months and 2.5x growth year-to-date as of April. This is not speculative TVL. These are actual financial instruments: tokenized treasuries, bonds, and private credit sitting on-chain today. The institutional names driving this are serious: Franklin Templeton's tokenized treasury fund, Ondo Finance, RedSwan Digital, and Centrifuge. These are not crypto-native experiments — these are traditional finance institutions choosing Stellar as their settlement layer.
What makes this meaningful for developers is that those $2 billion in assets do not just sit there. They are becoming collateral in lending protocols, being deployed in DeFi, and earning yields. That creates real primitives to build on top of.
DeFi Ecosystem Update
The Stellar DeFi ecosystem is maturing quickly. Here is the current state:
Blend has crossed $80 million in TVL, making it one of the most significant lending protocol deployments on Stellar.
Stellar Templars Protocol added six new real-world assets to lending markets on Stellar. You can now borrow stablecoins against tokenized institutional assets. The newly added collateral types include:
- DEJA (Centrifuge) — a AAA-rated CLO strategy
- DEJTRY — the Janus Henderson short-term US Treasury strategy
- CETES and USTRY (EtherFuse) — tokenized Mexican and US Treasury exposure
- soBTC/USDC pair — you can now use Bitcoin as collateral to borrow on Stellar
Institutional-grade RWAs as DeFi collateral is a significant milestone. Sovereign debt meeting DeFi accessibility is a phrase worth sitting with.
Sushi deployed their first concentrated liquidity DEX on Stellar. PYUSD/USDC and XLM/USDC pools are live. Cross-chain functionality is coming soon through Squid Router, which connects Stellar assets to 80+ other blockchains.
EURA — a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin from All Unity — is live on Stellar. This is a fully backed, regulated euro stablecoin built for institutional use. A regulated euro stablecoin on Stellar is a notable addition for builders targeting European markets or building compliant financial applications.
For a full picture of where Stellar DeFi stands, the SDF published a post titled "What the DeFi is happening on Stellar?" that captures how the ecosystem has been quietly maturing while others debate narratives.
x402 and MPP: Agentic Payments Are Live on Stellar Mainnet
Both x402 and MPP — the two leading agentic payment protocols — are now live on Stellar mainnet. This is a significant milestone for anyone building at the intersection of AI and payments.
The Problem They Solve
The entire payment infrastructure of the internet was designed for humans. An AI agent that needs to call a paid API hits a fundamental wall: there's a form, a billing dashboard, an API key a human configured. The agent hits a paywall and the workflow breaks. x402 and MPP solve this by making machine-to-machine payments as simple as an HTTP request.
x402
x402 is built on the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code — a code that has existed since the 1990s but was never meaningfully implemented until now. The flow is simple: an agent requests a resource, the server responds with a price, the agent authorizes stablecoin payment, and the resource is delivered. One HTTP round trip.
On Stellar, this settles in under 5 seconds. Stellar's fees — approximately 0.00001 XLM per transaction — are essential here: if your transaction fee costs more than the payment itself, micropayments do not work. Stellar also has USDC, PYUSD, and USDY as first-class native assets — not bridged, not wrapped.
x402 is co-governed by Coinbase (who launched it), Cloudflare, Google, and Visa. Google has integrated it into their agentic payments protocol. Cloudflare built it into their pay-per-crawl tooling. The SDF also brought OpenZeppelin into the picture — they secure over $130 billion in on-chain assets — to power the x402 facilitator and provide audited smart account contracts with programmable spending limits and guardrails.
MPP (Machine Payments Protocol)
MPP was co-developed by Stripe and Tempo and launched last month, and it is live on Stellar. Where x402 handles one payment per request, MPP introduces sessions: an agent pre-authorizes a spending limit up front, then streams micro-payments within that session, settling in bulk at the end. If your agent is querying a data feed thousands of times an hour, MPP sessions are the right model — you avoid the overhead of a per-request authorization for every single call.
On Stellar, MPP settles via Soroban SAC transfers. Agents never need to hold gas tokens because the SDK handles server-sponsored fees.
MPP launched with over 100 integrated services including Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Shopify, and Visa. The core spec has been submitted to the IETF for standardization as the official HTTP payment standard.
The Full Picture
To connect this back to everything else in this meeting: those DeFi protocols, tokenized assets, and stablecoin rails all become accessible to AI agents through these payment primitives. An agent can borrow against a tokenized treasury, pay for a data feed, execute a swap, and settle cross-chain — all programmatically, without a human in the loop.
Resources for Building
If you want to start building with these protocols, the best starting points are:
- developers.stellar.org → Build → Agentic Payments — x402 and MPP docs are here
- Stellar Dev Skill — a plugin for AI coding assistants (Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex) that gives your AI assistant deep current knowledge of the full Stellar stack including x402 and MPP
- developers.stellar.org/tools/ai — the building with AI page, including links to the
llms.txtfile for feeding Stellar context directly into LLM prompts, and Stella, the AI assistant trained on Stellar docs
Guest Demo: Noether — First Perpetual DEX on Stellar
The second half of this meeting featured Yahya and Mert, co-founders of Noether from the No Ethers team, recent graduates of the latest Stellar Community Fund funding round. Noether is, to their knowledge, the first perpetual DEX on Stellar.
Why a Perp DEX on Stellar?
The opportunity is straightforward: every serious DeFi ecosystem needs a perpetual DEX, and Stellar did not have one. Mert has been building on Stellar since smart contracts launched on the network, has hosted over 10 Stellar workshops in Turkey, and has mentored builders and served as a judge in Stellar hackathons. When Yahya identified the gap, they locked in and built.
What They Showed
Mert walked through a live testnet demo of Noether:
Faucet — A testnet faucet page where users can claim up to 1,000 USDC per day. Before claiming, users need to set up a trustline to the testnet USDC asset — a standard Stellar requirement for holding any non-native asset.
Trade Page — The core trading interface has three components:
- Order book on the left, showing pending limit orders with long orders on one side and short orders on the other, and the current market price in the middle.
- Price chart in the center, pulling real-time price data from Binance via a price proxy.
- Three trading pairs available at launch, with more pairs planned for the following month.
Smart Contract Status — The contracts are currently at MVP stage. Mainnet launch is planned approximately two to three months out, following a smart contract audit that will be supported by the Stellar Development Foundation. The team emphasized they will not launch on mainnet before the audit is complete.
On AI in Development
When asked what percentage of their codebase was written with AI assistance, Mert estimated around 70% — with an important caveat: the core financial logic in smart contracts was written and verified by hand. Their approach was to use AI for the less critical parts (landing pages, boilerplate, tooling) while personally reviewing and proving the correctness of anything financially sensitive. As Mert put it: "We write the code with AI but we read it."