Stellar - Executive Director Message 

A year ago, I started my journey as the CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation.  I didn’t know what to expect as I stepped through the doors that day. SDF had twenty team members, and I hadn’t met them all yet.  At 12:15 that afternoon everyone started getting up from their desks and moved to the kitchen.  Tomer Weller (now our head of integration) said “hey, denelle it’s lunch time, you should come join us.”  And I thought, “lunch? lunch together everyday?” I ate lunch alone for years in a conference room with a bowl of tomato soup, a diet coke and my computer.  So for the first ten days, I would grab lunch and come back to my desk. I told Tomer that I would eventually join but I needed some time to get used to the idea. I’m a creature of habit. 

And now, as I look back on the year, I realize it is the team that has made this year so memorable.  We’ve grown to just over sixty colleagues spread across three continents. Our organization has structure and focus - we built a strategy, solidified our cultural values, built a new mandate and moved the network and the ecosystem forward.  We did all of that and still had some fun.  We challenge one another, frustrate one another and make one another laugh.  This team is the one focused on creating equitable access to the global financial system, and I can say without a doubt that ‘we’ve got this.’  

After ten days, I finally jumped in and lunched with the team.  It’s become my new habit.  And now, a year later, it's those lunches that I miss as we “shelter-in-place” in our homes having lunch on our own.  What I realize is that while I have been challenged and fulfilled by the work this year, it is the right team, the right personalities, the right commitment, enthusiasm, diversity and creativity that creates the memories and forges the future.  I’m grateful to be at SDF and am looking forward to the successes of the next year.  

Thank you to the entire Stellar community for welcoming me into this role over the past year. I’m thinking of all of you and hoping you are safe and healthy during this time.

Denelle

‍Stellar Ecosystem News 

‍DSTOQ’s Bootcamp Application is Live
Congratulations to our friends at DSTOQ. The DSTOQ Bootcamp application is now available for download on iOS and Android. Check it out today!

Stellar Development Foundation Q1 in Review
To show the progress we’ve made so far this year, SDF released our first quarterly report, providing an overview of our achievements, growth, and performance in Q1 of 2020.

Stellar Development Foundation Announces Two New Members to Board of Directors
Ronaldo Lemos and Lin-Hua Wu join SDF Board effective April 2020

Stellar Development Foundation Announces Exclusive Partnership with Elliptic
Elliptic provides crypto-asset risk management solutions for crypto-businesses and financial institutions. Elliptic’s monitoring, compliance, and analysis software now incorporates support for XLM, the native asset of Stellar.

Ledger Live now supports Stellar
Stellar is now supported by Ledger’s most recent Ledger Live update. If you’d like to learn more about the work Ledger is doing, then check out last week's episode of the Stellar podcast!

‍Call for participation: Gitcoin’s New York Blockchain Week Hackathon
SDF is an official sponsor of Gitcoin’s New York Blockchain Week Hackathon! The virtual hackathon will run from May 6-May 27, and participants will have the opportunity to win lumen prizes. Register for the hackathon here.

‍Creating a Stellar Ecosystem Standard for Send/Receive Transactions
This month we held our first ecosystem round-table discussion featuring participants from across the Stellar-verse! The gist: right now, there's a widely used ecosystem standard for Deposit / Withdrawal transactions that Stellar anchors and wallets implement to allow users to obtain and redeem Stellar-network tokens in exchange for fiat currencies using their interface of choice. Check out Part 1 and Part 2

‍Issuer-Enforced Finality Explained
Jason Chlipala, COO at the Stellar Development Foundation, breaks down one of Stellar’s most powerful (and least understood) features. 

‍The Right Time for Open Source
Denelle Dixon reflects on open source and why now open source  is the right path forward.

‍Litemint.io is now live!
Litemint is a collectible card game powered by Stellar. You can play it on any device, no installation required. Check out the beta today!

Milestone: Over One Billion Operations
This April, Stellar crossed a major milestone. Over 1 billion operations have been processed on the Stellar network since it launched in 2015.

Building Stellar Core with Jon Jove - The Stellar Podcast
Behind all the simplicity and functionality of Stellar lies a complex and intricate C++ program, Stellar Core. Maintaining global consensus in near-real time across a global network of nodes is no small feat, and it doesn't happen by magic: it happens because of advanced programming designed and built by some of the world's smartest and most dedicated engineers. One such engineer, Jonathan Jove, joins us to talk about the artful task of building and maintaining such a system.

‍Stellar Developer News

Important:
With the Protocol 13 release approaching soon, we've created a guide to make the upgrade process easier for everyone.

Fixing Memo-less Payments
There’s now a simple solution to the “I forgot my memo” problem: exchanges and wallets can require memos for incoming Stellar payments by setting a flag on their account, and they can do it in a few clicks or in a few lines of code.

Did you know that we publish weekly updates of what's happening in the Stellar Ecosystem? Issue #41 is out now. Subscribe to the mailing list to get it direct to your inbox!

Events

Upcoming

Intuitive Stellar Consensus Protocol - May 8, 2020
Distributed consensus is the core of Stellar, but it can be difficult to understand. In this talk, Software Engineer Marta Lokhava will discuss the building blocks of the Stellar Consensus Protocol in a simple and intuitive way.

Jed McCaleb AMA at Consensus Distributed - May 11,2020

SDF at Consensus: Distributed - May 12, 2020
The Stellar Development Foundation is taking the stage at Consensus: Distributed this year in the Foundations track, which provides established blockchain networks like ours the opportunity to share all the exciting things we’re working on and what’s coming next.

Justin Rice at Reimagine 2020 - May 18, 2020

Past

Creating Usable Stellar Applications
Kolten discussed how we can move beyond crypto wallets to creating real world use-cases on Stellar.‍

‍Practical Path Payments
What are path payments? They're an operation unique to Stellar that allow you to send and convert money at the same time. I send dollars; you get Euros. In this talk —the first in our engineering series —Tyler explains everything he can about path payments with an eye toward practical application. Watch to unlock one of Stellar's greatest secret powers!

Jed McCaleb had a fireside chat at BlockDown 2020.

You can view the full list and recaps of past events on our new events hub!

SDF New Hires

‍Phillip Meng, Head of DEX Liquidity
Phil is responsible for leading SDF’s efforts in driving liquidity and promoting the overall health of the Stellar DEX. He has spent over 15 years at proprietary trading firms developing trading strategies, making markets, and managing portfolios in equity/index derivative products. Prior to joining SDF, he was at SFOX, a cryptocurrency trading platform, where he led initiatives to strategically grow the trading desk.

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We are hiring! Apply today.

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