2026-04-23
Messari State of Stellar Q1 2026
Messari published their State of Stellar Q1 2026 report ahead of this meeting, and there are numbers in it that every developer building on Stellar should understand — not as vanity metrics, but as signal for where the ecosystem is actually heading and where the real opportunities are.
RWA market cap — $2 billion at the time of the meeting, up from approximately $1.5 billion at the end of Q1 2026. That is roughly a 33% increase quarter over quarter and a 3x increase year over year from the $500 million mark in Q1 2025. The biggest single-quarter move across any metric in the report.
Average daily smart contract volume — $16 million per day in the last quarter. One year ago it was $2 million per day. For five or six consecutive quarters, Soroban transaction volume has only gone up. This is real usage: contracts being called, operations executed, applications that real users are touching.
Stablecoin market cap — $300 million, up 20% quarter over quarter. Protocols driving this include Aquarius, Blend, and SolarSwap.
The synthesis: Stellar is executing a compounding flywheel that is now clearly visible. Institutional capital flows in via RWAs, higher TVL attracts more DeFi protocols, more DeFi protocols drive more Soroban invocations, more on-chain activity attracts more developers, more developers build more user-facing applications, more users generate more stablecoin and payment volume — and all of that makes Stellar more compelling for the next wave of institutional adoption.
The full report is on messari.io and is worth reading in detail.
MoneyGram and SDF Extend Partnership
Announced on April 22nd at Stellar House in Mexico City: MoneyGram and the Stellar Development Foundation have announced a multi-year extension of their partnership. The framing is important — this is about scaling real-world stablecoin utility globally.
This partnership has been running since 2021. In that time they built the world's largest cash on- and off-ramp for digital assets, launched the MoneyGram Ramps API so developers can plug into the network directly, and created a stablecoin balance feature inside the MoneyGram app that lets customers hold funds in digital dollars and cash out at physical locations.
The next phase focuses on Latin America. The MoneyGram app with stablecoin support first went live in Colombia. With this announcement, it is extending to El Salvador, with more countries across Central and South America planned throughout 2026. The stack powering this is Stellar, Cross-Mint, and Circle's USDC.
The real-world scale here: MoneyGram operates nearly half a million retail locations across 200+ countries. That is not a sandbox — that is live infrastructure for people sending money to families and communities that depend on cash-based services. Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon said: "Stellar was built on the belief that the global financial system should work for everyone." This partnership is what that looks like in practice.
Aquarius Hits $50M TVL
Aquarius, the decentralized liquidity management platform built on Stellar, crossed $50 million in total value locked. Aquarius is Stellar's answer to DeFi liquidity infrastructure — AMMs, liquidity pools, reward systems — and it is designed to be a foundational liquidity layer that other Stellar protocols build on top of. When Aquarius TVL grows, the entire Stellar DeFi ecosystem becomes more liquid and more efficient.
For developers asking where to start: Aquarius has been investing in documentation. Their docs at docs.aqua.network now include real code examples — how to execute swaps through the optimal path, how to claim LP rewards, how to add fee configurations to swaps for building routers into existing applications. If you are building anything on Stellar that involves swapping assets, yield strategies, or liquidity-adjacent features, the Aquarius docs are a solid reference for what production-quality Stellar DeFi integration looks like.
Stellar Agents Hackathon: 260+ Projects
The Stellar Agents hackathon on DoraHacks just wrapped, with around 600 hackers submitting over 260 projects. The hackathon was focused on agentic payments using x402 and MPP — the two protocols covered in the previous developer meeting. What the hackathon showed is what happens when you put those primitives in the hands of 600 builders from around the world.
The following are standout submissions, highlighted not to endorse any specific project but to use them as a window into what is actually possible to build on Stellar right now.
Stellar 8004 — On-Chain Identity and Reputation for AI Agents
stellar8004.com addresses one of the most important unsolved problems in the emerging AI agent economy: there is no standard way to find agents, verify who built them, or evaluate whether they are reliable. You cannot search for a trustworthy A2A agent for a given task and get a verifiable answer. Every platform has its own walled garden, and there is no portable reputation.
Stellar 8004 takes its name from ERC-8004 on Ethereum (now going multi-chain) and gives every AI agent a blockchain-backed identity, a discoverable endpoint, and a reputation system you can verify on-chain. Think of it as LinkedIn for agents, except the reputation is not self-reported — it is attested on-chain.
The stack is built on three Soroban contracts:
- Identity registry contract — agents register with on-chain metadata and wallet binding
- Reputation registry contract — users leave feedback with average scoring
- Validation registry contract — third-party organizations can endorse agents through on-chain attestations
The live explorer at stellar8004.com lets you browse registered agents, check reputation scores, interact with them, and leave feedback. Registered agents can also advertise x402 and MPP payment support in their metadata, so agents can be discovered and paid per query in USDC.
For builders, the team also published a TypeScript SDK at tryon.lab/stellar8004 and a Claude Code skill with slash commands for building on top of the registry with AI assistance.
The conceptually powerful part is the agent-to-agent trust loop. When a DeFi agent wants to call a data analysis agent, it currently has no way to verify that agent is legitimate or reliable. With a registry like this, it can query on-chain, check the score, verify attestations, and decide whether to proceed programmatically.
One note for anyone building in this space: distribution is everything for infrastructure like this. In just one hackathon there were four or five similar projects targeting the same use case. If you are building an agent registry or identity system, check the ecosystem page first and understand the competitive landscape.
MPP Router (Rozo)
mpprouter.net.dev is a payment network router specifically designed for agent-to-agent micropayments. On Tempo, there are over 400 MPP endpoints. This router makes it possible for users and agents on Stellar to reach and use those endpoints by paying on Stellar.
Not yet on mainnet, but the problem it solves is real and concrete: 400 agents on another network, and this project makes them reachable from Stellar. The way to find good project ideas is to find the pain points of a network — this one found a clear one.
Stellar Security Audit Agent
With over $3 billion lost to hacks and exploits in 2025 (the worst year on record), and the industry already down over $600 million in just the first weeks of 2026, autonomous smart contract auditing is becoming genuinely important infrastructure.
Built under the handle Chinese Powered, this is an autonomous AI security auditor for Soroban smart contracts. It works in three steps:
- Bytecode verification — fetches the deployed WASM bytecode from Stellar and compares it against the source code. This step matters because one of the most common attack vectors is deploying different code than what was audited.
- AI-powered vulnerability analysis — runs a full checklist equivalent to the OWASP top categories for smart contracts: access control flaws, integer overflows, reentrancy, storage exploits, initialization attacks, denial-of-service vectors.
- On-chain audit record — audit results are written immutably into a smart contract on Stellar, creating a public, verifiable audit record that anyone can query.
The insight that makes this composable is step three: by writing audit results on-chain, you create an auditing layer that other contracts or agents can query. The project is currently on testnet and needs more work before it is production-ready — particularly around trust establishment and distribution — but the vision it represents is one of the most important unsolved problems in DeFi.
Stellar Mobile Agent Builder
Over 75% of crypto users access services via mobile, and in the markets where Stellar is most relevant — Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia — mobile-first is not a preference, it is the only option.
Built by Sam Felix, this project flips the assumption that running an AI agent requires cloud infrastructure. Take an old Android phone, run a FastAPI agent runtime on it using Ollama for local inference, and connect it to Stellar via MPP for per-request micropayments. Anyone with a phone can become a node in the AI agent economy.
What is particularly clever is the no-code layer on top: a visual drag-and-drop builder where non-technical users can design agent workflows without writing any code. The exact use case is letting someone in an emerging market use their device to provide or access AI capabilities that would otherwise be inaccessible or expensive. Not yet on mainnet, but the direction is worth noting for anyone building for global audiences.
Talos — Autonomous Agent Corporation Framework
Highlighted as one of the most polished projects from the CDMX hackathon, Talos is an autonomous agent corporation framework. It lets you create sub-agents and orchestrate them to act as corporate employees: dedicated agents for GTM strategy, marketing campaigns, engineering lead hiring, and so on. The payment layer runs on x402. If you have worked with Paperclip or similar autonomous agent setups before, the mental model will be familiar. One of the most common questions at the CDMX hackathon was how to use AI to steer an entire project or company — Talos is one of the more complete answers that came out of that event.
Stellar House Mexico City
Stellar House is SDF's format for bringing together builders, partners, and ecosystem members in a physical space — typically two to three days of talks, workshops, and demos. The Mexico City event just wrapped, and all sessions were live-streamed on the SDF YouTube channel (find them under the Playlists section of the channel).
Mexico City was particularly significant for two reasons: the MoneyGram announcement came out of it, and Mexico and Latin America broadly are central to Stellar's mission. The event also featured pitch presentations from several teams that came through the CDMX hackathon — building a pipeline from hackathon to Stellar House is a format that seems to be working.
Stellar AI Guide MX
For developers building on Stellar with AI tooling, a new open-source resource is available at github.com/kaankacar/stellar-ai-guide-mx. Check the building with AI section at developers.stellar.org for the full set of AI resources, including the llms.txt file for feeding Stellar context into LLMs and Stella, the AI assistant trained on Stellar documentation.