Not Just Another L1: Stellar Combines Real-World Impact with Developer Simplicity

With over a decade of engineering behind it, Stellar has quietly built one of the most resilient and globally active blockchain networks in the world. It has powered cross-border payments in over 70 countries, processed billions of transactions and become the backbone for on-chain real-world assets, with $17 billion in volume and $522 million currently on-chain. Now, it’s stepping into the spotlight.

Earlier this year, Stellar published its first ever public-facing feature roadmap, signaling a shift in posture from protocol-building to product acceleration. The message is clear: The Stellar tech stack is feature-complete and ready for developers.

In fact, it’s never been easier to build on Stellar. Whether you're launching a wallet, deploying smart contracts or experimenting with real-world assets, the protocol offers the scalability, tooling and ecosystem maturity that developers expect from a modern blockchain platform.

Scalability and usability at the core

The Stellar roadmap puts a strong emphasis on two things: scalability and usability. These are the pain points that stall both developer and mainstream adoption, while also being the areas where Stellar is making the most visible progress.

One major performance milestone for the year is the work to increase theoretical peak throughput to 5,000 transactions per second and gradually reduce ledger close times, with a target of 2.5 seconds. These improvements are made possible by ongoing optimizations to Soroban, the Stellar smart contract platform, including concurrency, aggressive caching and ahead-of-time compilation. While not tied to Protocol 23 specifically, these enhancements represent broader efforts to boost scalability and network responsiveness across the board.

These aren’t speculative upgrades. They’re production-oriented changes designed to meet the demands of real-world apps, especially in areas like payments, payroll and tokenized assets.

Will Peck, head of digital assets at WisdomTree, a $99 billion asset management firm, shared his perspective on building with Stellar: “WisdomTree is using Stellar to bring personal finance on-chain, providing greater control and creating new utility for tokenized real world assets (RWA). With high transaction speeds, low costs and features for regulated asset issuance, Stellar has been a strong network on which to tokenize. With investors craving more choice in how they put their money to work, our WisdomTree Prime app offers the largest line up of tokenized funds currently in the market, all of which are available on Stellar, giving these tokenized assets increased accessibility and connectivity.”

Freighter

One of the most developer-friendly moves in the roadmap is the investment in Freighter, an open-source browser extension wallet that sets the gold standard for Stellar-native user experiences.

Designed with both usability and extensibility in mind, Freighter offers a trusted, well-documented foundation for developers building wallets or integrating Stellar into their apps. The Stellar Development Foundation team wants to make sure that wallet builders have access to best-in-class tooling to support the ecosystem; improving the features within Freighter helps achieve the goal of giving them a stronger foundation.

A good example is Hana Wallet, which used Freighter’s SEP43 or Standard Web Wallet API Interface to develop a DeFi-enabled user experience on Stellar. “We chose to build on Stellar because the underlying infrastructure is purpose-built for real-world asset issuance and transaction volume. On top of that, the developer experience just keeps improving,” said Mark Jones, founder of Hana Wallet.

Upcoming updates to Freighter will add smart wallet capabilities like advanced authentication, passkey support and social sign-ins, with security that scales based on wallet value.

Meet Stella and the Smart Contract Copilot

Two other tools, Stella and the Contract Copilot, round out the new developer experience for Stellar by leveraging the latest AI.

Think of Stella as a wayfinding system: It aggregates technical video content, github, repositories, developer documentation and Discord conversations, making them easily searchable and context-aware. It’s designed to help developers get unstuck quickly and find the information they need. Stella is readily available on Discord and soon, it will be bringing more information to both Stellar.org and Developer Docs.

The upcoming Contract Copilot, on the other hand, is focused on writing smart contracts. It’s an AI-powered assistive tool that helps generate, validate and test Stellar contracts, effectively serving as an intelligent IDE plugin for the Stellar ecosystem.

Tooling that meets developer needs

Stellar is doubling down on developer experience with a modern toolkit designed to turn ideas into production-grade apps, fast. Whether you’re writing your first contract or scaling a live product, the latest upgrades lower the barrier to entry and help teams prototype, iterate and launch with confidence. From streamlined CLIs to smart contract explorers and trusted token standards, the Stellar stack is evolving to support the full development lifecycle.

Scaffold Stellar is a new onramp for developers entering the ecosystem, purpose-built to simplify onboarding and to cut down time-to-prototype. Designed in collaboration with ecosystem partners like Aha Labs, it provides a reliable starting point for building apps on Stellar. Think of it as a launchpad with a foundational tooling that gets developers from zero to demo with less friction and more confidence.

Stellar Lab has long been a go-to resource for experimenting with transactions and testing network calls. Now, it’s getting even more powerful with the addition of a Contract Explorer. Developers can instantly inspect contracts by entering a contract ID and accessing metadata, interfaces and storage with just a few clicks. With testnet and mainnet support, plus integrations with online IDEs like Codespaces and Codeanywhere, the upgraded Lab streamlines the smart contract development workflow from exploration to execution.

With Stellar Quickstart, spinning up a local Stellar environment is now as easy as running a single command: “stellar container start local.”

This launches a fully configured local testnet via Docker and automatically opens Stellar Lab in your browser, complete with all the tools needed to inspect transactions, view accounts and interact with assets in real time. It’s a sandboxed setup that mirrors production, perfect for local development without the usual heavy lifting.

Stellar CLI now supports transaction editing in clean, human-readable JSON. No more manually converting to XDR or starting from scratch. Developers can quickly adjust fees, change memos, add operations or modify timebounds right from the command line. It’s a faster, more intuitive way to prepare and debug transactions. And this is just the beginning – future updates will bring even more on-chain interactivity directly to your terminal. Developers can check out the Stellar CLI Documentation and watch a video showcasing its functionality.

Trusted standards with OpenZeppelin

As smart contract adoption grows on Stellar, developers can now build with battle-tested security. OpenZeppelin’s audited smart contract frameworks, including standards for fungible tokens, NFTs, multi-tokens and real-world assets, are fully integrated into the Soroban developer stack. These modular components follow best practices and reduce risk, making it easier to launch sophisticated token logic with confidence.

To support developers from testing to production, Stellar has integrated key OpenZeppelin tools directly into the Soroban workflow. Contract Wizard makes it easy to generate token contracts using a guided interface, while Monitor and Relayer offer real-time insights and secure API-based automation for deployed contracts. Code Inspector adds another layer of assurance by surfacing detailed information about production code.

These tools help teams move faster and accelerate safely without compromising on security or quality.

Building with support: The Stellar Community Fund

Great tooling is only half the battle – developers also need funding and long-term support. That’s where the Stellar Community Fund comes in. What began as a grassroots effort to back early-stage ideas has grown into a robust program that now supports teams throughout the entire project lifecycle, well beyond mainnet launch.

The fund offers several tracks, from early-stage prototyping to product launch. Developers can access support for things like architecture reviews, contract audits and even go-to-market strategies, all without giving up equity.

This level of structured support makes it easier to get from “hello world” to mainnet and it helps ensure that projects launched on Stellar are secure, well-documented and production-ready.

Infrastructure built for scale

Stellar infrastructure upgrades aren’t just about developer experience. They’re designed to handle real transaction volume. The Stellar Disbursement Platform (SDP) recently launched a new hosted mode, making it easier for enterprises to onboard and start sending payments without deep integration work.

On the data side, the Composable Data Platform (CDP) provides a customizable, low-cost way to ingest and transform historical network data. Built with Go-based ingest libraries and reduced overhead, it’s ideal for use cases that demand transparency and traceability, such as transaction auditing and compliance workflows.

And coming in Protocol 23, an improved RPC will streamline developer access to network data by integrating real-time Stellar asset activity and Soroban smart contract transactions into a unified, industry-standard format, with no changes required to existing implementations.

Not just ready: Already in use

Stellar isn’t just preparing for real-world assets. It’s already powering them at scale. The network currently hosts over $522 million in non-stablecoin RWAs and has processed more than $17 billion in on-chain volume. That places Stellar among the top blockchains for tokenized financial assets, a space where many competitors are still piloting or experimenting.

What sets Stellar apart is the combination of mature infrastructure, low transaction costs and near-instant finality, all critical features for institutions handling high-value assets. Built-in compliance tools and integration with regulated entities make Stellar especially well-suited for asset issuers looking to meet today’s regulatory standards without compromising speed or interoperability.

These aren’t proof-of-concept experiments. They’re production-grade deployments that depend on infrastructure designed to perform reliably at scale.

Why now is the time to build on Stellar

Stellar isn’t just a protocol; It’s a complete developer platform. One that combines performance, standards, tooling and real-world adoption.

With a clear roadmap, accessible tools and ecosystem support, Stellar is speaking directly to developers. Its message? You don’t have to fight the stack anymore.

Whether you're an EVM veteran or just exploring the world of RWAs and digital payments, Stellar now offers a path to build faster, scale smarter and launch with confidence. Get started with Stellar’s Developer Hub today.

Learn about development grants with Stellar Community Fund: https://communityfund.stellar.org/

Check out Stellar’s current roadmap: https://stellar.org/foundation/roadmap

Learn more about Stellar’s strategy: https://stellar.org/foundation/strategy

Follow Stellar on X for the latest news and updates: https://x.com/StellarOrg

Developers Doc: https://developers.stellar.org/