Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) leadership is signaling a decisive push into mainstream finance for the remainder of 2025, hinting that “some of the biggest names in payments and asset management” are set to go live on the network in the coming weeks and months.
Speaking alongside SDF CEO Denelle Dixon, José Fernández da Ponte—who joined SDF in mid-July and now serves as President & Chief Growth Officer—framed the acceleration as the culmination of a year spent laying technical and go-to-market groundwork.
Biggest Names In Payments Coming To Stellar
“We are the blockchain for financial services at scale,” Fernández da Ponte said, adding: “Over 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.”
He underscored the claim with growth figures from the on-chain economy: “If you look at TVL and DeFi for the last year, TVL in aggregate grew 2x. TVL on Stellar grew 9x… I have not seen a blockchain that has been growing there as fast.” The executive credited community-originated wallets and protocols, and the team’s continued work on “plumbing” for an open-source, permissionless stack, as catalysts for that momentum.
Dixon, for her part, positioned the first half of 2025 as “laying the foundation,” and said the back half must deliver “big acceleration” on the tech side, singling out Protocol 23 as the upgrade set to make Stellar “stronger, faster, and developers’ lives easier.”
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She also flagged the on-network expansion of the stablecoin universe—“PYUSD on Stellar was announced, new assets are coming, and others continue to scale”—plus tangible usage wins from wallet programs that have converted one-off sign-ups into weekly activity. Those remarks track with SDF’s public roadmap and adoption goals for 2025, which emphasize real-world payments, DeFi depth, and pushing toward top-tier TVL rankings.
The payments-stablecoin pillar is central to that strategy. In June, PayPal 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’s rails and broaden PYUSD’s 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.
On the protocol side, Stellar’s “Whisk” release—Protocol 23—anchors 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.
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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.
The organization will attempt to convert that pipeline into concrete announcements this week at Meridian—SDF’s flagship annual conference—held September 17–18 in Rio de Janeiro. With builders, policy voices, and would-be enterprise adopters on site, the event’s timing aligns neatly with leadership’s “coming weeks” guidance, though neither Dixon nor Fernández da Ponte named specific partners.
Will XLM Price Respond?
For investors asking whether XLM will respond, the market has so far treated the integration drumbeat as a “show-me” story. As of September 16, XLM trades near $0.379. XLM remains capped by mid-summer high at $0.52 that bulls will argue require either marquee partner go-lives, visible PYUSD settlement flows, or a broader macro driven rally for the entire crypto market.
Crypto analyst Crypto Patel (@CryptoPatel) shared via X on September 15: “Demand zone tested – XLM bulls ready to charge. Why this setup? Price retracing into a bullish Orderflow Zone → demand area in play. Strong rejection expected near current support. Previous week’s high at 0.4143 serving as liquidity magnet. 4H Market Structure remains bullish, supporting upside continuation.”
At press time, XLM traded at $0.378.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com