During the last two weeks Stellar illustrated average level of social activity. Stellar Network announced a new GO SDK release. This is the third official SDK supported by the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). The Go SDK is a set of packages for interacting with most aspects of the Stellar ecosystem. The primary component is the Horizon SDK, which provides convenient access to Horizon services. To continue, Canada’s leading cryptocurrency trading platform for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other major cryptocurrencies, has announced the addition of XLM to its coin offering on Coinsquare.com. XLM is the first coin from the global payment system Stellar. Finally, FCA-regulated payment platform, Wirex, has announced the launch of 26 fiat-backed stablecoins on the Stellar Network. The first stage of collaboration between Wirex and Stellar will be the launch of Stellar’s native asset, Lumens (XLM) on the Wirex platform. Lumens will join 19 other digital and traditional currencies that can be seamlessly converted and spent using the Wirex Visa card. Further updates will follow!
Development
Stellar team is pleased to announce the release of a new Go SDK for the Stellar network. Along with JavaScript and Java, this is the third official SDK supported by the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF).
horizonclient is a package that provides client access to a Stellar Horizon server. It allows you to retrieve ledger information, either as one-time calls or as a continuously updating stream. You can find account balances, check the status of a transaction, or monitor in real-time new offers for an issued token. You can also submit transactions. The client fully supports all the REST endpoints exposed by the Horizon API.
A second package, txnbuild, supports the convenient construction of operations and transactions. These are the building blocks of change in the Stellar system; to make anything happen on the network requires submission of one or more operations, wrapped in a transaction.
Kelp is a free, customizable, open-source trading bot for the Stellar universal marketplace. You can use it to create liquidity, set a spot price for tokens, make spreads and make markets, price and trade your own stablecoins, and mimic orders from other exchanges. It also works on some centralized exchanges such as Kraken, Binance, and CoinbasePro.
Fast moving markets that operate 24/7 can be daunting for even the most experienced traders. Running a trading bot with a fixed strategy can ease the stress of trading by automating the process. Bots also allow market makers to keep orders flowing quickly with desirable spreads. Additionally, automating orders in a 24/7 market benefits buyers and sellers regardless of where they are in the world. As the Stellar DEX grows, it’s important that users have quick access to liquidity regardless of their timezone, currency, etc.
Like all good trading bots, Kelp helps provide liquidity and maintain a good market spread. Here’s why that’s important:
Liquidity
One of the biggest challenges for any exchange is to address the issue of liquidity. Liquidity refers to how much of an asset can be bought/sold on the market with a minimal effect on the price.
Traders, whether individual or institutional, want their orders to be executed in a timely manner, with minimal slippage. That’s only possible on exchanges with deep order books, which is why most traders only use a handful of exchanges; they’re simply following the liquidity.
Bots provide liquidity by keeping order books stocked with offers that other traders can take. With Kelp, for instance, you can dynamically balance an order book to adjust to changing demand.
Say you have a Stellar-based token priced in XLM. You can use Kelp to place both buy and sell offers, and set it up to keep an eye on order book activity. When traders buy the token, demand goes up, and Kelp creates new sell offers at an incrementally higher price. When traders sell the token, demand goes down, and Kelp creates new offers at an incrementally lower price. As demand drives the token price up or down, Kelp adjusts its offers to keep the order book full and to keep the market liquid.
Market-Making
In the example above, Kelp is serving as a market maker: it’s placing both buy and sell offers, and making new offers as traders take existing offers off the books.
Bots are great at market-making: they have a high degree of precision, and they can work around the clock. With a bot, it’s easy to control the spread, which is the difference between the highest buy offer and the lowest sell offer. Narrow spreads are important for other market participants because it allows their orders to be filled at a fair price.
In addition to using Kelp to keep a narrow spread while allowing the price of a token to drift based on market dynamics, you can also use it to keep a narrow spread while controlling the price of a token.
Say you issue a USD stablecoin on Stellar. You want to keep the price of that coin pegged to an external reference: if the world at large is buying 10 XLM for $1, you want the price of your coin to hew to that price. You can set up the bot to place buy and sell offers, only this time, instead of responding to price fluctuations by incrementally changing the price, the bot checks the price against an external feed (like Kraken), and, if the price of the token on the DEX starts to drift, it places offers to bring it back in line.
As people use tools like Kelp Bot to devise trading strategies, provide liquidity, mirror other market orders, and create healthy spreads, we’ll see the Stellar marketplace mature and appeal to even more traders and services outside of the crypto ecosystem. After all, Stellar isn’t just for exchanging cryptocurrencies and tokens. FIAT currency traders, asset traders, anchors, financial services, and more could be incentivised to use Stellar if volume is growing, liquidity is abundant, and the market is showing signs of maturity.
What’s Next?
For the time being, Kelp bot can only be used through your PC’s command line, but if you’re interested in trying Kelp, don’t be intimidated: the documentation is easy to follow, and gives step-by-step walk-throughs and pre-configured strategies to get you started. Soon, the Kelp devs will be rolling out a graphical user interface to make it easy for non-command-line users to get up and running quickly.
Social encounters
One project is using Stellar (XLM) to provide much-needed liquidity to real estate and make it easier for investors to gain exposure to the UK property market.
Smartlands (SLT), which is headquartered in the UK but also has offices in Vilnius and Kiev, was the first ICO to take place on the Stellar blockchain, back in 2017. It allows developers to issue tokens that are linked to a specific property. Investors can buy and trade these tokens on the Smartlands platform, as well as sell them in a secondary market.
The first property to be tokenized is a student accommodation block in the city of Nottingham. Around 30% of the building’s equity will be available to purchase in a sale hard capped at £1M — roughly $1.3M.
Investors can expect monetary returns from tenants’ rent, as well as from the eventual sale of the property. For the Nottingham accommodation block, investors can expect annualized returns of more than 16%, according to the company’s website.
How to invest in tokenized real estate
The investment process is very simple. After passing the requisite KYC/AML checks, investors can browse projects featured on the platform, along with details on the properties, financial information and the proposed investor agreement.
Once an investor has selected a property, they participate in a token sale, which bears some similarities to an IEO. They can choose either to invest with fiat currencies, like the pound sterling or US dollar, or with cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ether, of Lumens (XLM) tokens.
Investors receive their security tokens once the sale has concluded. These can be held on the platform, stored in a custodial solution, or traded on a secondary market.
Although linked to a specific property, these digital assets technically represent equity in a holding company, which becomes the legal owner of the property in question. Companies can represent just one property, or for a collection of buildings, allowing investors to gain different types of exposure depending on what they’re looking for.
Smartlands will ‘accelerate’ construction
In addition to trading tokens directly on Smartlands, the platform is also exploring links to some public exchanges.
Issuing asset-backed tokens allows developers to release equity much earlier than they can in existing systems. Using Smartlands, on the other hand, “developers can actually accelerate their development.”
The platform is currently in discussions with the FCA — the UK’s chief financial regulator — to become a fully licensed multilateral trading facility (MTF). As well as providing the regulatory framework to operate a token issuance and exchange platform, an MTF licence would allow Smartlands to create a liquidity pool — which would help facilitate stable, round-the-clock trading in property-backed tokens.
What are the benefits?
Smartlands isn’t the only project bringing tokenization to real estate. Two U.S.-based companies are using the Tezos (XTZ) platform to create a virtual marketplace for property across South-East Asia.
Tokens like those offered by Smartlands are correlated with the underlying asset, rather than the cryptocurrency market. This could offer investors an ideal hedge against volatility.
The Nottingham block will be the first Smartlands sale, and the project will announce its second investment opportunity sometime early in May. Although the focus so far has been on the UK property market,, Smartlands is a global platform. Nauseda hopes to expand to property markets abroad sometime in the future. Using Smartlands, the lands available may become nearly limitless.
Upcoming events:
Location: NY, 16 Vestry St. May 7
Time: 18:00 bis 21:00
Location: Oberwallstrasse 6, Berlin. May, 9
Time: 18:30 bis 20:30
Finance
Canada’s leading cryptocurrency trading platform for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other major cryptocurrencies, has announced the addition of XLM to its coin offering on Coinsquare.com. XLM is the first coin from the global payment system Stellar. XLM (commonly referred to as Stellar Lumens) is known for facilitating the transfer of funds instantly around the globe, and built on the premise that the world needs a worldwide financial network open to everyone.
FCA-regulated payment platform, Wirex, has announced the launch of 26 fiat-backed stablecoins on the Stellar Network.
Unlike cryptocurrencies that are volatile in nature, stablecoins are pegged to real-world assets, such as fiat (i.e. USD) or gold. Since value is backed by a stable asset, stablecoins mitigate the inherent volatility in the crypto market. In turn, these digital assets can be stored, transferred and exchanged without any significant change in value.
The first stage of collaboration between Wirex and Stellar will be the launch of Stellar’s native asset, Lumens (XLM) on the Wirex platform. Lumens will join 19 other digital and traditional currencies that can be seamlessly converted and spent using the Wirex Visa card.
Integrating Stellar-based stablecoins onto the Wirex platform represents the point at which stablecoins transition from being novel to practical. For instance, Wirex stablecoins will be available to over 2 million retail and 5 thousand corporate customers across more than 130 countries worldwide.
See also:
Roadmap
Stellar Roadmap 2019
HORIZON
Horizon is a client-facing API server for the Stellar ecosystem. It is how developers connect their applications to Stellar Core. SDF currently maintains three Horizon SDKs: Javascript, Java, and Go. Early this year Stellar reached out to developers in the ecosystem to get their feedback on Horizon. Stellar will use this quarter to focus on improving the Horizon admin and developer experience.
- Mid/Late Q2: Bring Horizon SDKs to parity with Horizon server
- Q2: Create technical spec for Core/Horizon API
- Ongoing: Whittle down the Github PR and issue backlog
STELLAR CORE
- Q2/Q3: Improve decentralization while preserving performance
More validators will join the network if a Stellar node can run on medium-range hardware. Towards that goal, Stellar will improve data access to stellar-core’s database (by implementing batching and prefetching). Stellar will add safeguards for bad archives and allow full validator discovery and quorum configuration by Q3.
- Q2/Q3: Make node management faster and easier
- Ongoing: Maintain a consistent ship schedule
Stellar will have 6 Minor Releases in 2019; one each in February, March, May, June, August, and October. Stellar will push 3 Protocol upgrades; one each in Q2, Q3, and Q4. In Q2 Stellar will migrate the SDF infrastructure to a new production environment.
PRODUCT
- Q2: Redesign Stellar.org till May 1st.
- Q1/Q2: Publish More Content
- Q1/Q2: Make Better Tools: Dashboard, Laboratory, SEP6 validator
- Q2: Create an open-source Wallet SDK
- Q2/Q3: Improve Kelp, a trading bot library designed to make it easy to make markets on Stellar.
- Q2/Q3: Continue work on Lightning-like Payment Channels (aka Starlight)
ECOSYSTEM
- Ongoing: Increase community and marketplace presence
- Ongoing: Integrate more community feedback
Last year, Stellar announced a process for Core Advancements Proposals — proposals to change or improve the Stellar Core protocol.
- Ongoing: Collaborate with ecosystem projects
- Stellar.expert: supporting their headcount growth as they develop StellarExpert ID and also improve the information design and functionality of their ledger explorer.
- AnchorUSD: supporting improved brand messaging and user experience.
- StellarX: supporting their continued development as an open interface to Stellar’s decentralized exchange. Emerging projects will for this program continue to receive support via the Stellar Community Fund. Stellar will announce the specifics of the Community Fund in March.
ORGANIZATION
- Ongoing: Hire more good people
Q3:Increase clarity around SDF’s lumen holdings and distribution plans
A full accounting of SDF’s projects, grants, XLM holdings, and plans for those holdings is long overdue. By year-end there should be complete clarity around all SDF’s activities and assets.
What’s next?
Snapshot: 05/13/2019
Testnet: 05/13/2019
SDF nodes: 05/20/2019
Release: 05/23/2019
Partnerships and team members
No updates
Rumours
No updates
Social media metrics
The data shows very unusual pattern.
The graph above illustrates a slight increase in the number of Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. However, Twitter followers prevail. The information is taken from Coingecko.com
