What You Missed at the Stellar Meridian Conference

Real-world assets, the state of stablecoins and Paypal’s PYUSD now live

Rio de Janeiro set the stage for a major turning point in the Stellar network’s trajectory. At the 2025 Stellar Meridian conference, developers, enterprises and global institutions converged to reveal partnerships and products that underscored one message: Stellar is a payments powerhouse and quickly becoming the backbone of a new financial ecosystem.

The announcements in Rio touched every corner of on-chain finance. Stablecoins, tokenized U.S. Treasuries, cross-chain interoperability and institutional-grade real-world assets (RWAs) were all on the menu. PayPal, Circle, Ondo Finance, Centrifuge, RedSwan and Mercado Bitcoin all staked ground on Stellar, signaling that the network is positioning itself as one of the most credible platforms for regulated global-scale finance.

Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) CEO Denelle Dixon summed it up best: Meridian acted as a “forcing function” for institutions to go public with projects that had been building quietly in the background.

Day 1: Building the infrastructure for scale

The first day of Meridian 2025 focused on SDF’s core mission: supporting a blockchain built for everyday financial services.

José Fernández da Ponte, president and chief growth officer of SDF, emphasized that Stellar is doubling down on enterprise adoption and “extreme distribution.” For him, the transition was obvious: “Stellar was a very, very logical transition. It is the one blockchain out there that is built for everyday financial services.”

That growth is showing up in the data. Fernández da Ponte revealed that DeFi volume on Stellar has increased tenfold over the past year, while the developer ecosystem has expanded 50x, growing at a pace five to eight times faster than the broader blockchain industry.

Latin America featured prominently in Day 1 discussions. “The future is here, it’s unevenly distributed,” Fernández da Ponte said, pointing to the region as home to some of the most sophisticated financial users in the world. Wallet providers like Decaf illustrated this point with practical stories, leading with the fact that end-users aren’t thinking about “stablecoins” or “on-chain assets.” They’re just happy to receive reliable digital dollars they can cash out through MoneyGram or spend in-store.

Stellar also showcased new innovations that make payments seamless. Dr. Adam Lowe of CompoSecure demonstrated a tap-to-pay terminal enabling real-time USDC payments on Stellar. His point was clear: If institutions like Visa and Mastercard are going to embrace stablecoin payments, they’ll demand institutional-grade security.

That institutional validation is already underway. Marc Hegen, CTO of 21X, highlighted the “perfect fit” of Stellar as a well-established Layer 1 already in use by Franklin Templeton and WisdomTree. For these traditional players, Stellar has surpassed the experimental phase and is now in its operational infrastructure era.

Day 2: The RWA revolution

If Day 1 was about infrastructure, Day 2 was about partnerships. The message was loud and clear: Stellar is becoming a hub for real-world assets.

PayPal’s PYUSD goes live on Stellar

The headline announcement was PayPal’s decision to expand PYUSD, its fiat-backed stablecoin, onto the Stellar network. “We are now officially live with PYUSD on Stellar,” said Larry Wade, global head of compliance for PayPal's blockchain. “We cannot wait to deploy this chain and really help to revolutionize commerce.” For Stellar wallet users, the integration means being able to send value directly to millions of PayPal and Venmo accounts, with eventual support for payments to PayPal’s global merchant base. As Fernández da Ponte put it, “This is about connecting Stellar wallets to millions of PayPal merchants.”

Circle brings CCTP V2 to Stellar

Circle unveiled the next version of its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), expanding USDC’s reach with seamless interoperability across blockchains. This update makes Stellar a key pillar in Circle’s multi-chain strategy, further embedding USDC into the network’s financial rails.

Ondo Finance launches USDY

Tokenized treasuries are one of the fastest-growing categories in DeFi, and Ondo Finance chose Stellar for the launch of USDY, a tokenized U.S. Treasury product. This move brings yield-bearing “digital dollars” directly onto Stellar, giving institutions and individuals alike 24/7 access to safe, liquid assets.

Centrifuge debuts deRWA

Centrifuge introduced deRWA, an institutional-grade real-world asset protocol backed by a $20 million anchor investment. Fully integrated into Stellar from day one, deRWA is aimed at expanding access to yield-generating assets, particularly in emerging markets. “This launch is about connecting RWAs to solve real-world use cases,” explained Raja Chakravorti, chief business officer of SDF.

Red Swan tokenizes $100 million in real estate on Stellar

Red Swan announced that it has brought $100 million of institutional-grade commercial real estate onto Stellar, making one of the largest tokenized property portfolios available on-chain. By fractionalizing equity and debt in high-value properties across the U.S., Middle East and Africa, Red Swan is opening access to an asset class long reserved for institutions. Backed by SDF grants and integrated directly with Stellar, the platform lets accredited investors purchase yield-bearing real estate with stablecoins, positioning Stellar as a distribution channel for tokenized real-world assets.

Mercado Bitcoin brings $200 million in tokenized assets

Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin announced it would issue $200 million in tokenized assets on Stellar, cementing Latin America’s role as a proving ground for SDF’s mission of democratizing finance.

Visit the Stellar Meridian session recordings to watch the recap or browse the catalogue of individual sessions.

Why RWAs on Stellar matter

The sheer scale of these announcements shows how far the conversation around blockchain has evolved. The focus is now on tokenizing safe, regulated instruments like treasuries, payment stablecoins and commercial real estate – a far cry from the speculative assets talk of the past.

As Centrifuge’s product manager, Graham Nelson pointed out the integration of RWAs into Stellar will provide “big access for the emerging markets.” The maturity of these products signals that tokenization is ready to solve real business problems: faster settlement, expanded access and new sources of yield.

At the same time, SDF is helping to lay the groundwork for another critical requirement: privacy at scale. In traditional finance, confidentiality is a baseline expectation, but on public blockchains, openness is the norm. SDF’s approach in support of the Stellar network is to keep the underlying transparency that ensures trust and accountability (at the base-layer) while making privacy configurable and compliance-friendly at the application layer.

That strategy is moving from theory to implementation. Recent work includes a partnership with Nethermind to integrate the Risc Zero zkVM verifier into Stellar smart contracts, giving developers a foundation to build zero-knowledge applications directly on Stellar. And with the next protocol release under discussion, new primitives like confidential token properties, ZK proof verification and advanced cryptographic functions, from homomorphic encryption to bulletproofs and the BN254 elliptic curve, are on the horizon. These investments make privacy as usable as any other building block on the network, an essential step for enterprises bringing RWAs on-chain.

For traditional finance players like Visa, the implications are significant. Antônia Souza, Visa’s director of crypto, highlighted how stablecoin-linked cards are being developed to make stablecoin spending seamless: “The goal is that the user experience is so seamless that nobody needs to understand the underlying technology.”

Capital flows and builder momentum

It wasn’t just large institutions making news in Rio. Onigiri Capital announced a $50 million fund dedicated to supporting Brazilian and Latin American founders, connecting them with institutional markets in Asia. “Brazil is one of the most advanced markets among emerging economies in terms of FinTech innovation,” noted Qin En Looi, managing partner at Onigiri Capital.

Combined with the 475,000 global access points for cash-to-crypto ramps available on Stellar, these new investments point to a vibrant and fast-growing developer ecosystem.

A scaling network

Taken together, the announcements from PayPal, Circle, Ondo, Centrifuge, Mercado Bitcoin and others show that Stellar is becoming the connective tissue for enterprises and institutions looking to move real-world value on-chain.

$3 billion worth of RWAs are already accessible on Stellar. DeFi volume is multiplying. Developers are arriving in record numbers. And institutions like PayPal, Visa and MoneyGram are validating Stellar as a platform they can trust.

The message from Rio is clear: The Stellar ecosystem is forming at scale.

Looking ahead: Meridian 2026 in Abu Dhabi

The momentum won’t stop in Rio. Stellar has already announced that Meridian 2026 will take place in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on October 21 and 22, with HackMeridian scheduled for October 19 and 20. Hosted on the iconic Yas Marina Formula 1 Circuit, the event promises to take the movement into high gear, with builders and enterprises invited to secure their pole position in the future of finance.

If you’d like to dig deeper into this year’s headline theme at Meridian, the rise of real-world assets, Stellar has put together resources on tokenization that you can explore here. And you can watch CoinDesk Live from Day 1 and Day 2 of Meridian here.