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2024-07-18

· 2 min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager

Note: the first part of the call was lost. The video posted above captures the second half of the call where various ecosystem developers shared their use cases and needs for a smart wallet on Stellar.

  1. Tyler put forward a proposal for a smart wallet as a public good. Given that the native auth can be overloaded by using __check_auth, Stellar implementation of a smart wallet is fairly straightforward. The capability to customize the auth is already built into the core protocol.
  2. See the proposal here and implementation here
  3. The proposal only uses WebAuthN-based signers i.e. passkeys. It does not use ed25519, which, perhaps it should given that ~100% of the accounts on Stellar use the scheme. It also introduces the notion of temporary and admin signers to illustrate the notion that the account can be managed by multiple signers, each with a different access policy.
  4. The biggest unlock with custom auth is the ability to execute custom logic. We heard from various ecosystem members about how might they us it. 4a. A dev is building a perpetual protocol and thought smart wallets could be used to automatically manage defi positions, which would be a significant improvement over status quo where the user has to constantly track assets to determine when to execute a trade. 4b. Folks are excited about foregoing the seed phrase for passkeys, which is especially meaningful when onboarding net new users to the blockchain. 4c. Authorizing a cross-chain message from a different chain, especially programmatic authorization, requires an implementation of custom accounts. 4d. Some apps have noted that users prefer not to have a wallet but simply experience the value of the app, especially games. For this, the app may assign a temporary account to the user and control access via check_auth. 4c. Microtransactions without needing user sign is super interesting for apps as well.
  5. This has been a very insightful meeting and we learnt about how the Stellar ecosystem plans to leverage smart wallet. Let's continue the conversation in discord!

2024-07-11

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager
  1. SDF Data team gave a crash course in analysis of Stellar data, and covered how to access Hubble, tips for efficient querying, and how to get started with data exploration.
  2. Slides are publicly available and legible async.
  3. Tips for data anlaysis are also covered in docs
  4. Share your queries and post questions in #hubble in Stellar discord, which is a dedicated channel for data-related topics.

2024-06-27

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager
  1. Chad and Willem from Aha Labs discuss the updates to the new and improved stellar-cli
  2. Some highlights include the change from the name 'soroban' to 'stellar' when using the CLI tool and the addition of new commands.
  3. They cover some cool functions like local network setup, account creation, and transaction signing. with the following commands:
    • stellar network container [start|logs]
    • stellar keys [generate|fund|ls]
    • stellar contract init to get a whole new Soroban project
    • and so much more!
  4. They also discuss expected future updates including support for more Stellar operations and integration with Stellar Lab V2!

2024-06-20

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager
  1. Kirckz discusses Meru, a Financial services app for Freelancers and remote workers in Latin America.
  2. He shares his experience integrating Meru with Blend, a liquidity protocol primitive for Stellar.
  3. Kirckz shares the challenges faced during the integration and how they were overcome.
  4. He shares the sdks and libraries his team used to facilitate the integration.

Follow Meru on X (formerly Twitter) to stay updated: https://x.com/getmeru

2024-06-13

· One min read
Tyler van der Hoeven
Developer Advocate Director
  1. Tyler created Super Peach, a web3 application that uses passkeys to sign transactions. He demonstrated how passkeys can be used in authorization flows and how they can be used to sign transactions.
  2. Introduced passkey-kit. A TypeScript SDK for creating and managing Smart Wallets via passkeys (includes the actual Smart Wallet interface)
  3. Introduced Launchtube, a service for submitting transactions onchain by covering both the transaction fee AND the sequence number. Wild!
  4. He shared his vision for pushing the passkey implementation through to becoming a standard for the ecosystem.

Join the #passkeys channel on the Discord to continue the discussion

2024-05-09

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager
  1. Tyler built a voting application using passkeys to sign the transaction, which is an implementation of the secp256r1 verification function.
  2. He showed a cross-platform implementation (web and mobile) and demonstrated that passkeys are the perfect interface between web3 contracts and web2 authentication mechanisms that most end users are accostomed to.
  3. Ecosystem members discussed the use of smart wallets that would use passkeys as a signer. Challenges were identified around fees requires for smart wallets, the need for a common implementation for a smart wallet, as well as how might it interface with existing password managers.
  4. The voting application can be tried out at passkey.sorobanbyexample.org/
  5. Code for the demo is here github.com/kalepail/soroban-passkey

2024-05-02

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager

Discord Agenda thread

  1. Fifo presented Stellar Plus, which is a Javascript library to simplify the Stellar and Soroban development.
  2. Ecosystem members found the design for Stellar Plus composable and encompassing of all Stellar related functionality including management of assets, accounts, wasm-related operations, as well as RPC utils.
  3. The links to Fifo's presentation and Stellar Plus are:

2024-04-25

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager
  1. Garand discussed changes to the State Archival proposal based on feedback received at Meridian 2023. The proposed changes are:
  • Previously, a downstream system called the ESS (Expired State Store) would store expired entries. In the new proposal, There is no ESS. All Archived entries, as well as all information required to generate restoration proofs for those entries, is stored directly in the History Archive.
  • RPC nodes can generate proofs for archived state during preflight
  • Captive-core can be directly queried for archived state, meaning that RPC/Horizon instances can potentially service queries for archival state
  1. The draft proposal
  2. Ongoing discussion
  3. Snapshot size is TBD; it's a function of bucket list size as well as memory and historic demands placed on the RPC.
  4. Bloom filters are the likely solution for proof of non-exitance though they come with trade-offs. They enable fast and cheap lookup but are probabilistic not deterministic.
  5. Further comments are welcome.

2024-04-18

· One min read
Tyler van der Hoeven
Developer Advocate Director

Discord agenda thread

  1. Justin from ortege.ai demo'd Ortege, a data analytics platform for Stellar and Soroban.
  2. Ortege lets anyone in the Stellar ecosystem create dashboards to track any and all desired metrics. Ortege's queries, widgets, and dashboards are shareable making it the perfect platform to surface
  3. Justin will be releasing an AI soon and enable querying and insights via natural language.
  4. All are invited to create a free account and track the success metrics for their dashboard.

2024-04-11

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager

Piyal from Freighter discussed the proposal to standardize the wallet interface. Key points from the discussion are captured below. For full notes, please view the recording; and also refer to the proposal and the post on github discussions.

  1. The draft proposal
  2. Ongoing discussion
  3. Requiring the network passphrase might be uneeded complexity.
  4. Both WalletConnect and mobile wallets likely have significant differences than the proposed interface (which is targetted at browser extension wallets); and thus likely require a separate SEP. The said SEPs should be created by teams working on wallet integration with the said platforms.
  5. What is the role of the Stellar Wallet Kit in the ecosystem and how does it play with the standard itself?
  6. As next steps, Piyal will incorporate the suggestions from the ecosystem into the proposal.

2024-04-04

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager

Today's recording has two parts. The first 12 minutes are audio-only. The next 45 minutes have video as well. Please note the slides were shared in discord chat over screensharing, due to technical difficulties.

Part 1 (audio-only):

Part 2 (video):

Discord Agenda thread

  1. Piyal surfaced the proposal for a Wallet Standard and requested feedback.
  2. Cubist, an ecosystem project, discussed CubeSigner, a low-latency API for generating keys and signing transactions inside secure hardware.
  3. Stellar-based example of CubeSigner is available in the Cubist Labs Github repository
  4. Cubist devs can be contacted via the Stellar discord or the web form.

2024-03-28

· One min read
Naman Kumar
Product Manager

Agenda thread

  1. The Standards Working Group proposed changes to the SEP process that empower the ecosystem by making the current process more decentralized and ecosystem-friendly.
  2. The process has already been used for several proposals over the last three months.
  3. Esteblock from Soroswap shared their journey of participating in the proposal for Asset List (SEP-42) and implementing the proposed standard
  4. Discussion continues in the proposal doc.
  5. Next step is to get further ecosystem feedback then update the Github SEP repository with the updated SEP process.