This is not financial advice.
During the last two weeks Stellar illustrated average level of social activity. To start with, Stellar announced the launch of the StellarX mobile wallet for Android. It is a secure wallet built on top of the Stellar Network and allows you to easily create an account or login with existing StellarX account. Plus it’is a perfect compliment to the web app. With this wallet you can send and receive any Stellar token on the network. Moreover Stellar released Go SDK v.1.3.0. Changes include both increased flexibility when signing and building transactions and ability to export Transaction Envelopes before signing. Further updates will follow!
Development
Users will have access to wallet account balances including the ability send/receive any token on the network! More features coming soon
Download: https://bit.ly/2Lw3Dx6
Check out @_koltenb’s latest blog tutorial on exploring Stellar Addresses and the Stellar DEX.
Changes include:
- increased flexibility when signing and building transactions
- ability to export Transaction Envelopes before signing
More details on Github.
Stellar’s mission is to make global payments fast and inexpensive. Today, the payment landscape is fragmented. Every region has its own payment scheme and they’re not interoperable. Stellar is a global network that aims at connecting these different local payment methods. In order to do so, Stellar has made digital asset issuance a central feature of its design. So called anchors (regulated financial institutions) can issue any real world asset and represent it on the network. These anchors help users depositing money into Stellar and vice versa by withdrawing it from their Stellar wallet into their bank account when needed.
SEP-6, The Golden Standard for off-ramps
Stellar implemented a technical standard called SEP-6 to make it easier for wallets to integrate a variety of anchors. In short, SEP-6 is just a standard defining how wallets interact with anchors. It improves user experience by allowing wallets and other clients to interact with anchors directly without the user needing to leave the wallet to go to the anchor’s site. Moreover, it’s compatible with the anchor’s KYC/AML processes.
An example
For instance, if a user in Europe had to send US dollars to someone in the US, the user could purchase Anchor USD (anchorusd.com) and send it to the recipient. By using the Stellar network payment rails, the transfer takes 5 seconds and costs less than a penny. The recipient can then choose to withdraw these tokenised dollars from their wallet to their bank account using the AnchorUSD offramp.
Solar leads by example
Stellar’s vision for Solar was always to facilitate global payments and for people to use it in their everyday life. Adding full support for off-ramps brings us one step closer to that vision and as a result many wallets and anchors will follow. Competition between anchors forces the costs of withdrawing assets down for the user. These low costs make the Stellar network more attractive than traditional payment infrastructures, a feature critical for defining its success in the payments industry.
In the first release, we have a client interface for the following off-ramps:
- AnchorUSD (anchorusd.com) to withdraw US dollar to any US bank account.
Fees: 2% min. $5 - Stellarport (stellarport.io) to withdraw BTC, ETH and LTC tokens to crypto wallets.
Fees: vary by asset but generally very low - Tempo (tempo.eu.com) to withdraw Euros to any bank account via SEPA or Swift
Fees: €1.98 flat fee
Solar in the near future
- Improving asset management by showing complete anchor metadata (Logo, Contact info etc.)
- Implementing an onramp client (for depositing assets on Stellar e.g via bank transfer)
- Adding support for more anchors
- Inflation management: setting/changing inflation address
- Hardware wallet support
Get Solar here.
Social encounters
Lisa Nestor (@nestorious828) of Stellar SDF partnerships team gave a Stellar talk in Zug at the Crypto Valley Conference.
Upcoming events:
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) and Coinsquare are coming together for one evening in Toronto to share what they are working on these days, and what its vision for the future looks like.
Date and time: July 17, 2019 at 6.00 pm
Location: Coinsquare, 590 King St W · Toronto, ON
Finance
Roadmap
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.
This month the report covers important dev updates, @SatoshiPay and Fair Planet’s new partnership, Stellar Meridian, and more.
Partnerships and team members
No updates
Rumours
No updates
Social media metrics
The chart above illustrates a slight decline in the number of Telegram followers. In general, Stellar experiences average level of social activity.
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
