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2026-09-24

· 10 min read
Kaan Kacar
Kaan Kacar
Developer Advocate

Road to Hack Meridian, Episode One​

This week kicked off a live stream series that runs all the way to Meridian, our flagship conference, and Hack Meridian, the hackathon that happens right before it. The idea is simple: we want builders walking into Hack Meridian with as many resources as possible, and the first resource you should look at when building on Stellar is Raven. "If you're building on Stellar, just ask Raven" isn't an official slogan, but it's the one we keep repeating. I look at a lot of protocols to see how they help their developers, and — biased as I am — Raven is probably the best thing happening to a Web3 builder right now.

Thankfully I wasn't alone at 11 p.m. staring at my comment section. My guest was Feems from Guava Global, the studio managing the Hack Meridian efforts. Feems leads hackathon program design and the hacker experience: live streams, workshops, coordination with the activation hosts across Europe, and co-hosting these Thursday streams with me from here on.

Hack Meridian, the Facts​

Guava describes itself as a strategy and production studio that delivers events, activations, and experiences that bring ideas, brands, and communities to life. Hack Meridian is their big one this year:

  • Lisbon, October 25–26, at ONE16 — an old railway station, which is a very cool venue.
  • Two tracks. Genesis is for developers and founders bringing a new idea to Stellar. Scale is for existing projects looking to scale onto Stellar or integrate with it. The specific themes within those two categories drop soon.
  • On-site support, workshops, mentors, prizes, and a room full of developers from across Europe.
  • Find Your Way, the campaign this stream is part of: more than 10 partners throwing 20+ IRL activations across Europe — Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London, Porto, and more — for builders, founders, and newbies alike. The calendar lives on hackmeridian.com, and Guava Global's X account retweets everything.

Raven at a Glance​

Feems' framing beat mine (mine was "a time capsule of your future self talking down to you, informing you every step of the way"). When you build in an ecosystem, the biggest question is has this been built already? — and answering it normally means scouring tons of documentation. Raven collapses that into one place: hundreds of developer docs plus everything happening in the Stellar ecosystem, so you can ideate faster, check relevancy — the biggest problem at the scale stage — and keep up with how fast the development side moves. Think of it as your builder sidekick.

Setup is one line. Go to raven.stellar.org, copy the command for your AI tool of choice — Codex, Claude, whatever — run it, authenticate, done. I demoed it from a clean Claude Code terminal running Opus 5.5: open the MCP list, see that stellar-raven needs authentication, click authenticate, agree to the terms in the browser window, and you're connected in under a minute.

One piece of builder feedback worth adding. Technical questions are getting rarer — not because builders have no technical problems, but because the ecosystem has more than enough tooling to do practically anything on Stellar. The question has evolved from "how do I do this on Stellar" to "how do I find the material that lets my AI build X on Stellar," and that is precisely the gap Raven closes. Fewer technical questions also means more ideation questions: at the last Meridian, for every technical question we got ten about ideas, and whether that idea had already been validated in a recent SCF round.

The Demo: From "a ZK Track" to a Shortlist​

Feems walked through the questions every builder asks. Ideation: what could I build? (The part that takes longest; the heartbreaking failure mode is spending months on something nobody wants.) Validation: does anyone want this, does it fit the ecosystem, does it line up with funding? For Scale projects: market research and a real consumer base — which, not coincidentally, is what judges look at too. A future stream will cover judging properly.

So I played a Hack Meridian participant. My prompt, roughly: I'm at Hack Meridian and want to build something around privacy, maybe ZK — let's pretend there's a ZK track. Use Raven to see what privacy solutions are live on Stellar, and check previous SCF rounds for funded privacy projects. Also, you're being live streamed, so show how and why you're using Raven at every step. (I regretted that last sentence immediately. Don't tell your agent it's on TV.) Someone in chat pointed out I'm also a judge; I am, and a hard one to please — I try not to be impressed by projects.

While it ran I plugged a sibling project: Stellar Build, a more private, hands-on set of skills and personas for the AI of your choice that doesn't touch dynamic data. Stellar Build helps you decide what to build; Raven tells you what has already happened — and Stellar Build uses Raven under the hood, because Raven is the best.

Raven came back with the privacy projects live on Stellar today, each with its SCF cohort and the amount awarded: a reusable-KYC project, Moonlight (compliant confidential transactions), and Zarf — the Turkish team doing private token distribution with ZK, who you met in the July 2 note. It also laid out what the protocol itself supports right now, the technical border of what you can build — a border that gets wider every day. And because Raven indexes the Electric Capital developer report, not just SCF, it surfaced projects like KALIEN, Tyler's ZK-proven Asteroids game. Cohorts 23, 37, 40, and 42 flew past, each with the track applied to and the funding received.

Here's the point. I started "knowing" three things: I'm at the hackathon, there's a ZK track, I want to build on it. I got back ideas proven to have a place in the ecosystem — not to copy, but to build something bigger, smaller, nicher, or better on top of. Step two: pick one and go nicher. I grabbed one of the listed projects and asked whether a more niche version existed — think threshold encryption, confidential transfers, sealed-bid auctions. Raven's answer: a few, none funded or listed as projects, so maybe I'd walked down a wrong road — or a new one. The closest match was Stelvin, a sealed-bid batch DEX that uses drand time-lock encryption rather than ZK, built by a Turkish builder I know who won our Istanbul hackathon in June 2025. It also surfaced Sub Rosa, a sealed commit-and-reveal protocol that, if I remember correctly, has received InstaRewards and is heading into the upcoming SCF round. The name-dropping isn't the point; the speed is. You go from "privacy, I guess" to "here is the shape of the final product" in minutes, as long as you know the next question to ask: what can be nicher, what can be bigger.

And my standing advice to builders: you chose Stellar and you chose this hackathon — so at the very least, choose to build something that brings you joy.

Protocol 28, and a Correction​

Feems asked how a newcomer finds technical documentation through Raven. The answer explains what Raven is: an MCP, and MCPs fetch dynamic data. Every call pulls not only the Stellar skills, every SCF submission, and every project in the Electric Capital report, but the developer documentation itself — Raven's Stellar docs family is a full-text search over developers.stellar.org. So I asked it what changed with Protocol 28.

Raven said Protocol 28 has three CAPs and "is not live yet." I let that slide on stream, so for the record: the three CAPs are right — CAP-83 (validators can vote to drop the transaction set from the current ledger), CAP-85 (externally managed contract executables), and CAP-86 (host functions for sparse Symbol-keyed map creation and unpacking) — but "not live yet" was stale. Per the software-versions page in these very docs, Protocol 28 hit testnet on August 27 and mainnet on September 16, a week before this stream. The tooling part was correct: stellar-core and Stellar CLI v28 are out, open source, on GitHub. Go update.

Scale Track: Find Your Nearest Neighbor​

We'd just wrapped a hackathon in Istanbul with the same Genesis/Scale split, so Feems asked how Scale projects should use Raven. For a Scale builder the question is "what's my next step," and you answer it by being inspired by something. What my teammates and I did with the Istanbul Scale track was help each team ask Raven: is there a project similar to mine, what are the differentiators between theirs and mine, and how do I make mine better? That's where scaling starts, and where differentiating yourself from the rest of the ecosystem starts.

How We Actually Use It​

Me: every time a builder asks me anything about Stellar, I ask Raven first — partly to answer, partly to check it still works. I use it to research older content, and almost daily to find out whether a tool is being built somewhere in the world. Say I want a Go CLI for Stellar: maybe someone is already building it, or building something that gets me there faster. The research side is the side I use most.

Feems: understanding past hackathons and the projects that came out of them, to build better personas for these streams and the hackathon itself. It aggregates all things Stellar, which is exactly what a program designer needs.

What's Next​

Feems closed with the activation calendar — events next week in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Berlin, and Paris from hosts including CryptoDays and Layer X, with the slide refreshed every week.

Next Thursday the topic is LayerZero OFT and USDT0: how USDT0 works on Stellar and how the underlying OFT infrastructure works. We ran an informal survey of builders, and cross-chain applications and privacy were the runaway answers. We have NEAR Intents, we have CCTP, we have a bunch of things — but LayerZero is one of the newest integrations and deserves a proper walkthrough. The week after will probably be privacy again: we've covered SPP and confidential tokens a lot, but one more, more mathematically detailed session — maybe with one more guest — wouldn't hurt.

Closing​

More than 150 people watched this at midnight my time, and Feems joined at 4 a.m. in theirs — one finds a way. I also owe you a promise: I will spend thirty minutes of my night learning how to zoom in on my terminal, so nobody has to squint next time. I just got my visa, so fingers crossed I'll be in Lisbon, side by side with Feems, helping you build more interesting things. Follow Guava Global on X and keep an eye on hackmeridian.com. See you next week.