2026-06-25

Another Doozy of a Week

Before the guests, a quick bit of ecosystem context for why this week felt busy. Per the on-chain data, Stellar's RWA market cap just crossed $3 billion — you can see it for yourself on the Dune dashboards. And the ideal Stellar developer meeting, in my book, is one with as many guests as possible, because the conversation I keep having with projects is that they want a real way into the ecosystem. Contributing is one way; introducing yourself on this call is another. This week we had two guests and, with a bit of luck, a new viewer record.

We also had four days left to submit to the Real World ZK hackathon on DoraHacks — more on that from our second guest below.

Guest: Gaian — Stablecoin Rails for Southeast Asia

Our first guest was Gaian (gaian.network), a stablecoin payment infrastructure for the APAC region. In one sentence: it's an API that connects crypto wallets to local banking rails using USDC on Stellar, moving value between stablecoins and local currencies like the Vietnamese dong to power merchant payments, on/off ramps, and cross-border transfers that settle straight into real bank accounts. Imagine paying for a coffee in Hanoi straight from your Freighter, Albedo, or Beans wallet — that's the promise. Kelvin walked us through it live from Vietnam (at 1 a.m. his time).

Gaian isn't new — the team has been at it for over a year and pivoted twice; what they demoed is the v2 of the API. They're live across APAC (Vietnam, the Philippines, part of Thailand) plus Brazil and Peru, and in Vietnam and the Philippines they operate as the anchor themselves, working directly with the top banks.

How the Flow Works

There are several actors but only one payment. A consumer holding USDC talks to a wallet; the wallet talks to the Gaian API; Gaian uses the blockchain as the settlement layer and a partner PSP in the destination country to land fiat in the merchant's bank account. Crucially, the merchant sees no blockchain at all — they just receive fiat.

Authentication

The v2 API authenticates every request with an HMAC signature. You get an API key and secret from the self-service dashboard, build a canonical message out of the timestamp, method, path, query, and body, HMAC it with your secret, and base64-encode the result. Every request must carry that signature and timestamp.

The Order Lifecycle

There are two halves — onboarding a user, then placing an order:

1. Onboarding. Create a user (POST /v2/users), associate a wallet address to that user (the address is just a string — the wallet provider controls it), then generate a KYC URL for the user (providers vary by country) and poll their status by ID or wallet address until it's approved.
2. Payment. Ask Gaian for a code by passing the scanned QR string, the fiat amount, and the user's wallet address. Gaian returns a code ID, the fiat amount, the total (including the bank's processing fee), the exchange rate, and the decoded bank details. Then place the order with that code ID — Gaian returns an order ID, a status label, the settlement wallet address, and the token address (USDC today). The wallet signs and broadcasts the USDC transfer to the settlement wallet (not an API call), and finally notifies Gaian with the transaction hash so Gaian can verify it on-chain and mark the order settled (there's no automatic chain listener yet). There's also a prefund flow where a wallet pre-funds stablecoin with Gaian.

The Demo

Kelvin ran the whole thing live from a Bruno collection and a demo wallet, paying ~21,000 VND (under a dollar, with a small minimum bank fee) to a real Vietnamese bank account. The first code expired mid-explanation — a hazard of a good demo — and re-verifying settled it. The real headline: the self-service dashboard means any viewer can sign up, grab API keys, and integrate Gaian's payment capability into their own wallet without ever talking to sales, up to a ~$4,000 cap before KYB is required.

Gaian went live on Stellar the previous Friday, and for now it's mainnet-only — going fast to production rather than testnet-first. The one thing I asked for repeatedly (and will keep pestering them about) is a self-service sandbox on testnet, so we can amplify Gaian as an anchor to builders across the Philippines and Vietnam.

The Real World ZK Hackathon

Our second guest was Jeremy (also known as J Romero), the ecosystem partner running the Real World ZK hackathon on DoraHacks. The scope is deliberately wide open: anything that touches zero knowledge on Stellar qualifies — privacy pools, private payments, confidential tokens, verifiable computation, even ZK games.

The news he dropped live: for the first time ever, they extended the deadline by about a week, so it lands just before the US holiday (giving builders more time and keeping judging off the judges' holiday plates). The prize pool is $10,000 in XLM across five places ($5,000 for first down to $750 for fifth), plus a random $100 in XLM for someone who fills out the feedback survey. Requirements are light — an open-source repo and a short demo video.

Everything runs on DoraHacks (search "Stellar"), but the real hub is the dedicated Telegram group (1,000+ people), where ecosystem ZK teams — Nethermind, Boundless, OpenZeppelin, Aztec — hang out to help. A prolific builder who's won three prior Stellar hackathons (including the ZK Gaming one) is helping as a mentor this round. There's also a resources tab on the hackathon page you can point your AI at, and office hours were being scheduled. Jeremy's parting advice: don't let AI name your project (three teams showed up with identical AI-generated names), and build the thing you're passionate about — Stellar has always been about local builders shipping local solutions.

Closing

I also gave a shout to the Pulso hackathon in São Paulo (on DoraHacks), whose prize includes a fully sponsored trip to the Stellar Summit, with live pitches across Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. I'd planned to close with a live stellar-build session — using the Justin and Nicole personas to show off the new self-running loop and spin up a ZK project idea — but at 75 minutes and seven cups of coffee deep, I saved it for next week. Next week we also have another guest, so please be there.