Tellus Cooperative 🌎

Stellar Meridian 2026 just wrapped up in Lisbon and there's quite a lot to unpack from what happened before and during the event. One thing that stood out to me was how much of the conversation revolved around making Stellar more useful, not just for crypto natives but also for institutions, businesses and everyday users. Before Meridian, HackMeridian brought together over 350 builders from 36 countries, with around 165 projects submitted and $30K in XLM prizes. The focus was on AI, payments, DeFi and building with Stellar primitives. It's good to see builders exploring practical use cases around the ecosystem. Nest and Alloy took the top spots, winning the Genesis and Scale tracks respectively. Other finalists included TroqPay, Booker Bob, 4ward and ZKross, with several projects also recognized in the Small Wins category. Then came the announcements. On the institutional side, @The_DTCC announced plans to bring tokenized US securities, including Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs and US Treasuries to Stellar with a targeted launch in the first half of 2027. @Securitize also announced plans to support Stellar, while other developments involving Janus Henderson, Centrifuge, Figure and Marketnode further highlighted the growing interest in bringing traditional financial assets onchain. On the user and DeFi side, @MetaMask added Stellar as a default network across its mobile app and extension, making it easier for users to access Stellar through a familiar wallet. @WalletConnect expanded its Stellar support, WalletConnect also announced a partnership with @PenrosePartners to bring WalletConnect Pay to merchants across Bermuda, supporting the government's ambition to build a fully onchain economy. while @CurveFinance Finance launched its first native deployment outside the EVM ecosystem on Stellar. There was also a major technical announcement Project Thruput, a new execution model designed to improve Stellar's transaction capacity through parallel processing. Its early benchmarks showed significant performance improvements, with execution scaling across multiple machines. And perhaps one of the discussions I'll be following closely made by @tomerweller is SDF proposal to explore evolving XLM tokenomics. The idea is to explore activating the existing network fee pool to fund rewards for productive participation in the ecosystem, such as providing liquidity or capital for collateral. This is still an early discussion, not an implemented change but I find the direction interesting. It raises an important question about how XLM can become more connected to the economic activity happening on Stellar. Overall, Meridian felt like a reflection of where Stellar wants to go next. More institutional assets, better payment infrastructure, improved network capacity, easier access to DeFi and a deeper connection between network activity and XLM utility. There's still a lot to execute, but the developments from this year Meridian give us quite a bit to follow. If you are also building on stellar, I will love to connect with you.