Stellar Development Foundation

The Stellar Development Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded in 2014 that maintains the Stellar network's codebase, funds its ecosystem and engages with institutions. The network runs the Stellar Consensus Protocol, a federated Byzantine agreement in which validators choose their own quorum slices and settle within seconds without mining; the base layer also includes built-in decentralised order matching and path payments that convert between assets automatically during a transfer.

The Soroban smart contract platform went live on mainnet in 2024, with contracts written in Rust and compiled to WASM, using ledger-denominated state rent and archival to control state bloat. In 2026 the Whisk upgrade, known as Protocol 23, introduced parallel transaction scheduling, a reusable WASM module cache and in-memory state reads, plus automatic restoration of archived contract entries on invocation, lowering fees and raising throughput. The foundation also runs a community fund and a dedicated adoption fund for ecosystem grants.