Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) leadership is signaling a decisive push into mainstream finance for the remainder of 2025, hinting that \u201csome of the biggest names in payments and asset management\u201d are set to go live on the network in the coming weeks and months.<\/p>\n
Speaking alongside SDF CEO Denelle Dixon, Jos\u00e9 Fern\u00e1ndez da Ponte\u2014who joined SDF in mid-July and now serves as President & Chief Growth Officer\u2014framed<\/a> the acceleration as the culmination of a year spent laying technical and go-to-market groundwork.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are the blockchain for financial services at scale,\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez da Ponte said, adding: \u201cOver the next months, you will see some of the biggest names in payments and asset management that will continue to go live on the network.\u201d<\/p>\n He underscored the claim with growth figures from the on-chain economy: \u201cIf you look at TVL and DeFi for the last year, TVL in aggregate grew 2x. TVL on Stellar grew 9x\u2026 I have not seen a blockchain that has been growing there as fast.\u201d The executive credited community-originated wallets and protocols, and the team\u2019s continued work on \u201cplumbing\u201d for an open-source, permissionless stack, as catalysts for that momentum.<\/p>\n Dixon, for her part, positioned the first half of 2025 as \u201claying the foundation,\u201d and said the back half must deliver \u201cbig acceleration\u201d on the tech side, singling out Protocol 23 as the upgrade set to make Stellar \u201cstronger, faster, and developers\u2019 lives easier.\u201d<\/p>\n She also flagged the on-network expansion of the stablecoin universe\u2014\u201cPYUSD on Stellar was announced, new assets are coming, and others continue to scale\u201d\u2014plus tangible usage wins from wallet programs that have converted one-off sign-ups into weekly activity. Those remarks track with SDF\u2019s public roadmap and adoption goals for 2025, which emphasize real-world payments, DeFi depth, and pushing toward top-tier TVL rankings.<\/p>\n The payments-stablecoin pillar is central to that strategy. In June, PayPal <\/a>disclosed plans to make its dollar stablecoin, PYUSD, available on the Stellar network, pending regulatory approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services. The move would add another high-profile issuer to Stellar\u2019s rails and broaden PYUSD\u2019s distribution beyond its current venues. Neither PayPal nor SDF has provided a firm mainnet date, but the companies have reiterated the intent publicly throughout the summer.<\/p>\n On the protocol side, Stellar\u2019s \u201cWhisk\u201d release\u2014Protocol 23\u2014anchors the second-half execution plan. SDF documentation describes a package of eight Core Advancement Proposals that include parallelized processing, unified events, fee and throughput improvements, and developer-facing refinements around Soroban smart contracts.<\/p>\n SDF scheduled testnet and governance milestones across the summer, setting up a mainnet vote around early September. The intent is straightforward: raise performance and ergonomics to meet the institutional-grade expectations of payments processors and asset managers now circling the network.<\/p>\n The organization will attempt to convert that pipeline into concrete announcements this week at Meridian\u2014SDF\u2019s flagship annual conference\u2014held September 17\u201318 in Rio de Janeiro. With builders, policy voices, and would-be enterprise adopters on site, the event\u2019s timing aligns neatly with leadership\u2019s \u201ccoming weeks\u201d guidance, though neither Dixon nor Fern\u00e1ndez da Ponte named specific partners.<\/p>\n For investors asking whether XLM will respond, the market has so far treated the integration drumbeat as a \u201cshow-me\u201d story. As of September 16, XLM trades near $0.379. XLM remains capped by mid-summer high at $0.52 that bulls will argue<\/a> require either marquee partner go-lives, visible PYUSD settlement flows, or a broader macro driven rally <\/a>for the entire crypto market.<\/p>\nBiggest Names In Payments Coming To Stellar<\/h2>\n
Will XLM Price Respond?<\/h2>\n