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.