Without a doubt, Stellar has one of the strongest communities around its token in the crypto space. They encourage people to use their product and build useful tools with it. Let’s take a look at how they do it.
Introduction to Stellar Developer Program
In the past, Stellar launched approximately every three months a new build challenge for its community members (especially developers) incentivizing them to create useful tools and spreading the word about Stellar.
However, they noticed that this hackathon-style outcome-based competition did not get the wanted results as many projects just stagnated after collecting the funds while only a few grew into actively maintained products.
Therefore, the Stellar Developer Program has been created. The SDP will be reviewing projects on a monthly basis and provide them with ongoing support and feedback. The projects under the SDP will be receiving funds to continue their development and operations. With this new program, Stellar hopes to create an ecosystem of high-quality and maintained projects.
SBC projects
Development of SDKs
Stellar consists of a wide range of software development kits supporting several programming languages like JavaScript, Golang, and Java. The SDK allows developers to interact with the Stellar Horizon API and build applications with it. One of the latest additions is the Stellar SDK for iOS so app developers can integrate Stellar-based operations in mobile applications. It’s great to see such variety in SDKs as that further increases developer support so any dev can adopt Stellar.
Stellar token wallets
Many wallets have been developed over the past year, Lobstr.co is an online secure Stellar wallet that supports all Stellar assets. Why is it worth mentioning this specific wallet? During the 7th SBC, Stellar announced that they wanted to see UI and UX improvements to the existing wallets. Lobstr.co introduced a clever idea where they credit each new account one XLM as that’s the base amount to activate an account on the Stellar network.
For many new users, buying one XLM via an exchange (and going through the KYC procedure) to send to your new Stellar wallet just to activate it, requires a lot of efforts. Because of this, many users just leave their XLM holdings on the exchange wallet which is less secure compared with a wallet like Lobstr.co where you own the private and public key.
Lending users this one XLM to activate their account helps them to speed up adoption and remove barriers. UX-wise this is a very clever move.
Not to mention, if your wallet is inactive for 20 days more (no activity like trading or login), Lobstr will claim back the lended XLM by deactivating your account. Also, as soon as you receive funds into your Stellar wallet, the 1 XLM credit will be paid off.
Stellar Token Exchanges
Stellarport.io
Stellarport.io is a SBC product that is widely used by the Stellar community. Stellarport.io stands for a secure and reliable portal to the stellar network. Using their intuitive portal, users can create and manage their wallet, send payments in all stellar assets, and trade on the stellar decentralized exchange.
StellarX
StellarX is a candidate for becoming one of the most appealing, user-friendly decentralized exchanges (DEX) seen yet. The DEX offers a range of assets including cryptocurrencies from multiple blockchains, using stellar lumens (XLM) as the base currency. The exchange differs significantly from other DEX projects as it offers trading ranging over multiple assets like BCH, BTC, USD, ETH, and much more where other DEX projects only focus on one offering.
StellarX operates as a true DEX, meaning that it does not hold any funds of users at any given point in time and it operates a zero fee policy. What makes it even more special is the possibility to deposit fiat into the exchange.
Other Relevant Projects
Through the SBC challenge, many relevant projects regarding security were developed. For example, Stellar Authenticator is a tool for creating accounts and validating transactions on Stellar. Besides that, Stellar Authenticator helps you to securely create transactions while keeping all your private data encrypted.
StellarGuard is an extra security plugin for your Stellar account to protect it from security flaws. Whenever an attacker is able to access the private key of your account, StellarGuard helps to prevent him from stealing your funds. StellarGuard utilizes the Stellar network's multisignature functionality to protect your account. It’s actually very simple, you create a StellarGuard account and add this public key as an additional signer to your main account containing all your funds.
Lumenauts.com is an amazing website that creates “Unofficial Stellar Guides” as that’s how they like to call it. The site has quickly become the number one source for tutorials, explanations, and news.
Stellar partnership grant program
Stellar.org is accepting proposals from industry leaders that want to build on top of the Stellar network to improve the global financial landscape and promote financial inclusion. Stellar is even willing to provide up to $2,000,000 for exceptional products that run on top of the Stellar network and that are crucial for mass adoption by the financial world. In total, 25 billion lumens are up for grabs for projects to develop new interesting tools with the Stellar technology via the Partnership Grant Program.
Stellar and Keybase partnership
One of the fruits of this Partnership Grant is the partnership Keybase acquired with the Stellar Foundation. Keybase has created a general set of cryptographically secure tools (chat, file storage, git) which will be supported by Stellar.
Stellar is foremost looking for a connection between strong cryptography and real-world identity. Therefore, Keybase is an interesting partnership as it is able to validate people by adding multiple social (and other) handles to verify someone’s account. The more verified handles an account is, the more trusted.
The goal is to transfer XLM to someone using its verified social handle instead of using a hard to remember string of characters, also called a public key. In short, Stellar seeks to interact with persons financially in the same way we interact with someone socially.
“You can send around every asset under the sun, not just your local currency—that’s where money is heading.”
The bottom line
Stellar is doing a great job building, incentivizing, and growing their community. On the one hand, developers get a chance to get rewarded for their hard work, on the other hand, Stellar users are able to profit from all these new tools that are being developed. Stellar has one of the largest communities due to all the efforts they put in their community. It’s great to see that amazing projects like Keybase partner with Stellar to pursue amazing things like building one global currency.