Stellar Development Foundation's Ecosystem DevRel team got together to talk about the past year, and what 2025 brings.

In this meeting SDF Core Software Engineer Jay talks about BLS building blocks, and walks through examples and demos.

In this meeting SDF Developer Advocate Chris Anatalio talks about the future stack, including smart contract wallets and Passkeys. In the second half SDF Core Software Engineer Siddharth Suresh talks about increasing Soroban limits.

In this week's call we talk to Alberto Chaves from Trustless Work about building an escrow service on Stellar, followed by a quick introduction to using AI-based tools to develop Soroban smart contracts.

Agenda: Discord thread

At this week’s developer meeting, Jeesun demonstrated the new Stellar Lab, showcasing its enhanced features designed to improve the developer experience.

The tech stack of the new Stellar Lab was discussed in the meeting, and the following demos were used to show the Lab's functionality:

1. Enable MultiSig Exercise
2. Stellar Wallets Kit
3. Create & Fund Account
4. Save KeyPairs Feature
5. Save Transactions Feature
6. XDR to JSON mapping
7. RPC Methods - including simulateTransaction

Agenda: Discord thread

SDF’s Platform team had an internal hackathon last week, with the purpose of building applications utilizing the Composable Data Platform (CDP). In this week’s developer meeting some of the team members present their projects. The apps are widely varied (trading app, fraud detection, JS browser-based ingester, etc) but the intent here is to show how easy CDP is to use.

Projects presented in the meeting:

1. Trade Aggregations Service
2. Deceptiscan - CDP fraud detection
3. Composable Data Platform Hackies - data indexer, payment indexer, contract expiration alerter, data indexes in DuckDB, torrents for data indexes and ledger metadata)
4. Data ingest with frontend JS
5. Real-time analytics

Agenda: Discord thread

Summary: Hoops Finance, a DeFi protocol, discussed their platform they are building. https://www.hoops.finance/

1. They abstract away the complexity of DeFi investments for normal users through a series of guided prompts.
2. Provides simplified access to LP liquidity provisioning abstraction
3. Public AMM API for read/write data on AMMs on Stellar
4. Hoops Finance API: https://api.v1.xlm.services/#overview

Agenda: Discord thread

SDF DevRel team member Carsten Jacobsen showed how to build a simple Hello World dapp based on a Soroban smart contract and Next.js through these steps:

1. Create the default Hello World smart contract using the Stellar CLI
2. Create TypeScript bindings (package) using the Stellar CLI
3. Create the default Next.js using the npx create-next-app command
4. Add and link the TypeScript binding package to the Next.js project
5. Create a simple frontend with a form to submit a string
6. Import the package in the Next.js page, and setup a client
7. Create submit-function to send form value to the smart contract
8. Use useState to store the smart contract response and display it

Agenda: Discord thread

Developer Experience team member Nando Vieira introduced the CLI features alias and snapshot:

1. Alias
   1. Install of Hello World example for showcasing alias
   2. Showed examples of how contract IDs are often passed as parameters in CLI commands like invoke (copying ID string or command substitution)
   3. How to deploy a smart contract and create an alias
   4. How to invoke the smart contract with the alias
2. Snapshot
   1. How to create a ledger snapshop
   2. How to use the snapshot in a test case

Towards the end Nando went through the developer documentation, with focus on the added command line examples for Windows users, and a useful cookbook for CLI commands.

Agenda: Discord thread

Platform team demonstrated Galexie, a part of CDP(Composable Data Platform):

1. Galexie
   1. Data Extraction: Extracts raw ledger data from the Stellar network
   2. Compression: Compresses raw data for efficient storage
   3. Storage Options: Supports runtime configuration through the Datastore abstraction to use various physical storage layers, starting with Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
   4. Modes of Operation: Can operate in either batch mode or streaming mode
2. Composable Data Platform
   1. Flexible Datastore: Multiple options for physical data storage layers
   2. Galexie: Used to extract, compress and export data to your chosen Datastore
   3. Transform: Structure data in a model suitable to your application
3. Pluggable Data Pipelines
   1. Workflows: Create ETL(extract, transform, load) pipelines
   2. Streaming: Fast, lightweight streaming data

Agenda: Discord thread

CAP Core team deliberated on the proposed CAPs:

1. Addition of a constructor to Soroban's flavor of Rust. CAP
   1. Team's concern was about potential break in compatibility, which Dima had addressed. There were no further concerns.
2. Addition of BLS12-381 curve and required field arithmetics - CAP
   1. Team's concern was about providing functions to check invalid input. It's too computationally expensive to do the check at the contract layer so the it may need to be implemented as a host function. Jay is seeking ecosystem input around use cases that require strict input validation.
   2. There were no further concerns.
3. Increase performance by upgrading Soroban's VM. CAP Discussion
   1. Team's comments were about accuracy of the measurement method but the demonstrated benefits of wall clock time were thought to be promising.
   2. There was a suggestion to expose performance improvements to contract developers thus creating the incentive to optimize contracts to leverage the improvements.
   3. There were no further concerns.

Discord agenda thread

Core Developers discussed the latest proposals to advance Stellar Core in this week's Protocol Meeting.

1. The proposal for addition of a constructor to Soroban’s flavor of Rust was introduced in a previous protocol meeting (previous meeting), documented in CAP-58. A constructor is a function that will only be executed the first time the contract is created.
2. In this meeting, Dima discussed the updates made since the last meeting:
   1. Default constructor - if a constructor is not defined explicitly, the contract is treated as if it has a constructor
   2. Semantics of the return value - if the transactions succeeds, it is required to return a valid value
   3. Constructor interaction with custom accounts - custom accounts must be aware of the context that they are authorizing.
3. Graydon discussed the upgrade to the Wasmi virtual machine, documented in CAP-60. Wasmi works by translating WebAssembly code to to an Internal Representation (IR) and then executing it. The upgrade is impactful in two ways.
   1. Translating from WebAssembly to IR takes longer but the execution of the resulting IR is performant.
   2. The upgrade introduces lazy compilation. Of all functions in a contract, only ones that are called in a given transaction will translated thus reducing both latency and fees.
4. Jay discussed addition of BLS12-381 cryptographic curve, documented in CAP-59.
   1. Addition of pairing-friendly elliptic curves enables zk-based applications. 11 host functions have been added to expose mapping, pairing, and arithmetic on the BLS12-381 curve.
   2. Examples case of BLS signature verification was presented. It consumed 26M instructions (running natively), which is promising given the per-transaction limit is 100M.
   3. There was general agreement that the interface is the right one as it allows a contract developer to implement a wide variety of use cases. Discussion continues in discord.
   4. Jay requested that developers should build applications against the function and give feedback.