2026-06-18

June 18, 2026 · Kaan Kacar, Developer Advocate

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A Doozy of a Week

This week was a doozy — not just one exciting guest, but a pile of news and a stack of tools to use and maybe break. Before the guest, a quick ecosystem roundup. The big one: v16 of the JavaScript SDK is live. If you’re building on the JS SDK, upgrade your codebase and read the release notes to see what changed. Ask in the Stellar Developers Discord if anything trips you up. Two more things worth your time. Our Real World ZK hackathon with onlyhacks is still running — 11 days left to submit, $10,000 in prizes. The brief is simple: build anything that uses zero knowledge and runs on Stellar — privacy pools, private payments, confidential tokens, identity and compliance proofs, provable computation, verifiable data. If it’s ZK and it’s on Stellar, it counts. And if your team is closer to launch, SDF and CV Labs have opened the Stellar CV Labs Accelerator — SDF’s first EMEA-focused program. It’s a 12-week remote-first accelerator with a two-week in-person boot camp in Cape Town, supporting 10 early-stage startups across DeFi, payments, and RWA in the ME region. Selected teams get technical support, tokenomics advisory, go-to-market guidance, mentor 1:1s, ecosystem perks, and up to **$150,000 in XLM** in initial development funding from SDF. Post-program, top teams are eligible for additional SDF grants and a joint IC review with CVVC's fund — up to another $150k per team for the top two. Applications are open until July 3rd. For context on why any of this matters: per the Electric Capital developer report, close to 1,800 builders shipped on Stellar this week, and we had nearly 150 builders live on the call when we started (peaking past 470 by the end). There’s a synergy here, and I hope you can feel it too.

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Guest: XCCY — A Fixed-Rate Engine for DeFi

This week’s guest was XCCY (short for cross-currency swaps) — an on-chain interest rate engine that’s integrating to Stellar. The pitch: lock in a fixed yield on stablecoins, borrow at a fixed rate for a known period, and hedge variable interest rates instead of guessing where yields will go. Their current platform already shows around $1M in liquidity and roughly $2M in 24-hour volume. Dennis (co-founder and CEO; background in math/CS, several DeFi protocols, and HFT trading) and Dmitri (CPO; a TradFi derivatives background) walked us through it. XCCY was accepted into SCF’s 41st cohort, is deployed on EVM mainnets today, and started building on Stellar two weeks ago.

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The Problem

There’s a huge amount of unhedged floating-rate exposure across DeFi. In TradFi this is solved with an interest rate swap — a derivative that lets you exchange a fixed, predefined rate for a floating rate tied to some source (Fed funds rate, or in DeFi a lending market’s borrow/lend rate). XCCY brings that primitive on-chain, leaning into an RWA-looping narrative and fixed rates on Stellar — natural given the depth of RWAs and lending markets like Blend and YieldBlox on the network.

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Three Primitives

Dennis demoed the platform (live, on Stellar testnet, network errors and all) and the math behind it:

1. Oracle Hub — XCCY uses two oracle types. Reflector (5-minute candles) for collateral pricing, and RedStone for some assets like RWAs. For rates they derive APR oracles by applying exponentially weighted moving average smoothing — because lending-market rates only update on trades, so without smoothing the rate can sit unchanged for long stretches.
2. vIMM (virtual IMM) — an AMM-style engine, close to Uniswap v3 with liquidity ticks, but instead of trading token-vs-token it trades a fixed rate against a variable rate tied to an underlying (e.g. a Blend rate). Pools issue fixed tokens (representing a fixed ~1% APR factor) and variable tokens (whose growth tracks the underlying). It’s a zero-sum game — the sum of LP and taker tokens is always zero, so when one side loses on a rate change, the counterparty earns it.
3. Collateral Engine — handles LTVs, liquidation bands, and stages. Stable-vs-stable isolated pools can run very high LTV (~99%); portfolio exposure with volatile collateral needs more buffer. Crucially, because an interest rate swap’s P&L is driven by accrued value over time rather than instantaneous price spikes, the engine can support high leverage for shorter tenors using dynamic upper/lower “worst-case” bounds — more collateral for longer maturities, less for closer ones. Settlement happens automatically at maturity, much like options.

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What’s Next for XCCY

Mainnet is several months out, gated mostly on audits given the complexity, with the Stellar testnet and SDK landing in a few weeks. The API already exists and is being ported to Stellar this month — and they explicitly want to adapt it for AI agents, so a strategy can be wired up with “one prompt or one skill.” Cross-chain arbitrage across their existing EVM pools is on the roadmap too. Reach them on the Stellar Discord, Telegram, or X. It’s a fitting guest for where Stellar is: nearly $3 billion in RWAs on the network today, and teams like XCCY are coming precisely because of the institutional and real-world-asset depth.

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stellar-build: Your Whole Dev Journey in One Command

The AI half of the meeting was a walkthrough of stellar-build (stellar.new) — the tool the DevRel team shipped last Friday and used at the Istanbul hackathon. It’s a one-command installer that drops 42 skills plus curated data on 700+ projects built on Stellar and 9,000 projects from Electric Capital’s developer reports into your setup. Since Friday it’s been installed about 101 times. The idea: answer almost every question a builder would otherwise ask a mentor during a hackathon — is this a good idea, has it been done on Stellar, can it be done on Stellar, who are my competitors — not just “how do I implement X.” It’s built on the BMAD method, so it’s a hands-on, orchestrated journey rather than a one-shot app generator. You’re the orchestrator; the AI personas and their data do the legwork while you say yes, no, or maybe. Those personas are the DevRel team rendered as agents: Justin (analyst), Bri (tech writer), Nicole (PM), Kaan (UX), Tyler (architect), and Elliot (senior dev) — spanning the idea, planning, solutioning, implementation, and launch phases. There’s a party mode that brings everyone into the room at once, and a stellar-help router that re-orients you whenever you forget where you are.

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Live Demo

I drove it live for the ZK hackathon. Asked Justin what to build; he pulled my prior context (via the mnemon memory plugin), then loaded the competitive-landscape skill and went treasure hunting through both the curated catalog and the Electric Capital dump. He surfaced real neighbors — Zarf Protocol (an SCF 42 privacy-preserving token distribution with ZK private claims), Sora Drop (an open-source but non-private airdrop tool, ~$48k from SCF 28), and a stealth team porting the same primitive — making the point that the Merkle-claim mechanic is already being commoditized, so the opening is a sharp, specific application rather than yet another ZK toolkit. From there we routed into a PR FAQ validation (working-backwards stress test) with Justin, then pulled in Tyler to sketch the architecture with full context handed off cleanly — issuer contract, circuit spec, storage layout, interface signatures. Every persona ends its turn with concrete next steps, which matters: even the human versions of these people aren’t always in the room. That’s stellar-build — the entire DevRel team as agents on your screen. Grab it for this week’s Real World ZK hackathon on DoraHacks, and I’ll see you next week.