Skip to main content
August 13, 2026 · Kaan Kacar, Developer Advocate

​
A Short One, For a Good Reason

This week’s meeting was a short one, because it had exactly one job: announcing the 12 winners across 6 tracks from last week’s Stellar Builder Summit in São Paulo. I was on the ground with the builders all week, so this was less news roundup, more handing out trophies. My colleague Teague Kaylor from SDF’s marketing team — focused on developer marketing, which means most of the developer events and programs you see from us have Teague’s fingerprints on them — joined to set the scene before the announcements.

​
What the Builder Summit Is

Builder Summits started as a pilot last year at Consensus Toronto: a long-form developer event that brings the community together over an extended stretch to jam on projects, meet new teams, and get properly connected to the ecosystem — instead of the usual 48-hour hackathon sprint. Toronto went well, so this year the plan is to run them in the markets the foundation is launching into. São Paulo was the first. The final numbers: around 190 developers from around the world, coding for eight days straight, with workshops and sessions through the week and community days over the weekend. The event was produced with NearX — Stellar’s partner in Brazil — and our other partner teams on the ground, and the same week São Paulo also hosted Stellar House, a one-day gathering on tokenization, stablecoin rails, and cross-border settlement. Attached to the summit was a bounty program — Teague described it as a mix of an RFP track and a hackathon — pointed squarely at what we want to see built on the network: privacy, anchors and ramps, local yield, and agentic payments and tooling. More Builder Summits are coming later this year, so watch the @BuildOnStellar handle on X for announcements.

​
The Winners: 12 Across 6 Tracks

The format: for each track, second place first, then the winner. One housekeeping note before the list. I read these names off the results live and dropped the repo links into the YouTube stream chat as I went (sorry, Twitter viewers — we still haven’t figured out posting links there). The canonical list, with correct spellings and repo links, is going out via @BuildOnStellar and our summit partners, so trust that over my pronunciation. Where the auto-captions and I couldn’t agree on a name, I’m describing the project rather than guessing.

​
Privacy: Confidential Tokens & Private Payment Wallets

Second place went to a Confidential Token SDK — a TypeScript client for OpenZeppelin’s confidential tokens, with a verifiable replay archive. If you read the July 2 note on the confidential-token developer preview, this is exactly the tooling layer that preview was begging for. I talked with this builder in São Paulo, and their read on our confidentiality layers was genuinely insightful — the placement is well earned. The winner: a privacy wallet — a passkey-based smart wallet with confidential transfers and a shielded pool whose idle liquidity earns yield. Keep this builder in mind; they show up again below.

​
Enterprise Compliance & RWA

Second place: Green Road by Trustless Work — a confidential milestone escrow that releases a private allowance without revealing the amount. We all know and love Trustless Work and their escrow infrastructure, and this is a natural extension of it into the confidential era. The winner: QuietBook — confidential book-building for tokenized RWAs. Sealed bids, a provable winner, atomic settlement. Need I say more? I don’t think so. It came from a Turkish builder the community knows as Captain — we all met Captain in São Paulo, and the stream chat’s verdict (“Captain is the goat”) stands.

​
Anchors & Ramps: Regional Kits

Second place, Trustless Work again: a LatAm ramp kit — a drop-in SDK and React component kit that adds fiat ramps to any LatAm app. Two placements in a single summit is a statement. The winner: a Brazil regional kit — a PIX on- and off-ramp for Brazil with live quotes from competing anchors. It’s an aggregator; we all need it, we all love it. The team behind it we’ve known since our hackathon in Mexico — long-term builders in this ecosystem, still shipping.

​
Anchors & Ramps: Emerging-Market Yield

Second place went to a project that parks idle receivables in Brazilian treasuries while measuring the currency risk. The captions and I jointly butchered the team’s name on stream — apologies again; the official winners list will do it justice. The winner, from a Brazilian DeFi team: BRL that earns Brazilian treasury yield right up to the second a PIX payment fires. Which, as I said on the call, is pretty cool.

​
Agentic Payments

Second place: a discovery layer that lets AI agents find what to pay for on Stellar. Every agent-payment stack eventually hits the “pay for what, exactly?” question, so yes — we all need this one too. The winner: StellarPay — one middleware for every machine payment protocol on Stellar. x402, MPP Charge, MPP Channel — all of it behind a single interface. And yes: same builder as the privacy wallet above. Two tracks, two first places, one summit.

​
CLI Plugins & Dev Tooling

Second place: a CLI plugin that lets an AI agent safely call a Soroban contract, gated by an on-chain policy. If you’ve ever wired an agent up to a Soroban contract, believe you me, you might just need this. The winner: Stellar Memory — a persistent memory layer that links a Soroban repo to what’s actually live on-chain. I love a memory layer as much as the next guy, and I’m glad the track went to a project that closes the gap between your codebase and the deployed reality.

​
Closing

Close to 200 builders, building for almost a week straight — thank you for showing up. Thanks as well to the judging bench (I was on it, alongside colleagues from SDF and friends from across the ecosystem) and to NearX and the partner teams who produced the event with us. My last words on the call stand: I hope to see every one of these projects evolve into something bigger, and I hope you get to brag one day about how your journey started at a Builder Summit in São Paulo. More of these are coming later this year. See you next week.