The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) is an open-application awards program that draws on community input to support developers and startups building on Stellar. The SCF Build Award operates in 6-week rounds, including two-step panel review process and community vote.
SCF #41 is the first round under SCF 7.0, a significant structural shift that introduces three distinct tracks: the Open Track for novel on-chain use cases (reviewed by the delegate panel and voted on by the community), the Integration Track for projects building on existing ecosystem tools (reviewed by the delegate panel only), and the RFP Track for targeted developer tooling needs (reviewed by the delegate panel only).
We received 85 submissions, 50 of which were submitted for their first ever SCF Build award. Thank you to all submitters and reviewers for your hard work!
34 projects were awarded across all three tracks with a total of $3,941,744 worth of XLM — making it the highest awarded round to date. Click on the project name to view their successful submission! Please note that in order to view the SCF Dashboard, you need to be logged in. If you do not yet have an account, you can create one by signing up with Discord.
Build Award Recipients**
Projects can request an SCF Build Award up to $150,000 worth of XLM*. The SCF Build Award is for projects which have significant (user) traction OR teams that are experienced in the Stellar ecosystem and have identified a validated need, both with a well thought out plan and architecture to be ready to build upon receiving the SCF Build Award. Learn more in the SCF Handbook.
Open Track
Novel on-chain use cases — reviewed by the delegate panel and voted on by the community via Neural Quorum Governance. 12 of 33 submissions were awarded.
Trustless Work — $80,000 worth of XLM*
Trustless Work provides non-custodial, role-based escrow infrastructure built on Stellar, enabling platforms and enterprises to safely coordinate conditional payments using stablecoins.
PG Atlas — $150,000 worth of XLM*
PG Atlas primary role is to shift public goods funding decisions from noisy, subjective signals to verifiable, data-driven insights by quantifying adoption, criticality, reliability, security/quality, and decentralization (risk) across open-source tools.
Merkle Science Platform for Soroban — $138,000 worth of XLM*
Merkle Science is expanding coverage to Soroban bringing enterprise-grade compliance tools — risk scoring, transaction monitoring, and flow-of-funds analysis — to Stellar’s smart contract platform.
Hatom Protocol — $135,000 worth of XLM*
Hatom Protocol is a DeFi liquidity hub that turns idle capital into productive, composable liquidity.
MPCVault Stellar Integration — $150,000 worth of XLM*
MPCVault is an institutional-grade MPC (Multi-Party Computation) wallet platform seeking to integrate natively with the Stellar Network.
Advanced Debugging for Soroban Smart Contracts — $150,000 worth of XLM*
Advanced Debugging for Soroban Smart Contracts delivers advanced debugging for Soroban smart contracts through a precise low-level debugger that inspects execution inside the Soroban runtime.
Paywit — Wallet-Agnostic Stablecoin Payments on Stellar — $70,000 worth of XLM*
Paywit is a wallet-agnostic payment layer enabling merchants to accept stablecoin payments on Stellar without integrating individual wallets or managing blockchain complexity.
Warp Drive — $150,000 worth of XLM*
WarpDrive is a high-security execution framework that brings verifiable off-chain automation to the Stellar ecosystem.
Cushion — Capital Protection — $118,400 worth of XLM*
Cushion provides non-custodial, capital-protected investment strategies designed to reduce downside risk for digital asset and RWA investors.
Noether — $86,200 worth of XLM*
Noether is a decentralized perpetual futures exchange built natively on Stellar/Soroban.
Wirex — Vottun Stellar SDK: A Scalable Development Framework — $129,600 worth of XLM*
Wirex, in collaboration with Vottun as its development partner, proposes the creation of a modular and reusable SDK for the Stellar ecosystem.
Payala — Enabling Offline Payments in the Stellar Ecosystem — $150,000 worth of XLM*
Payala enables secure, real-time digital transactions without requiring an internet connection, using Smart Cards and NFC-enabled smartphones
Integration Track
Projects building on existing ecosystem tools — reviewed by the delegate panel only. 9 projects were awarded.
Wellspring– $100,000 worth of XLM*
Wellspring is a treasury management and payments platform that enables individuals and businesses to earn yield on their assets and move money globally using stablecoins and fiat rails from a single, integrated dashboard.
Tipper — $79,125 worth of XLM*
Tipper is evolving from a tipping platform into a full solution for Latin American content creators, increasing monetization opportunities by adding an invoice solution and an automated content creation engine.
Syklo — $104,500 worth of XLM*
Syklo delivers decentralized payment infrastructure designed to support scalable financial applications on Stellar.
Surgepay– $115,000 worth of XLM*
SurgePay provides USDC-powered cross-border payment infrastructure for Africa, enabling instant transfers with integrated local currency on/off-ramps.
Piggy Wallet — $125,000 worth of XLM*
Piggy Wallet is a self-custody app that helps parents manage allowances, chores, and savings for their kids.
Neon Wallet: Unlocking Stellar — $129,000 worth of XLM*
Neon Wallet is an established, non-custodial wallet designed to provide a seamless and secure experience for the cross-chain user.
Helix Labs — $149,999 worth of XLM*
Helix Labs is a native multi-chain staking infrastructure connecting institutional DeFi liquidity across sovereign L1 ecosystems.
Conomy_Payment4Platforms — $103,000 worth of XLM*
Conomy P4P (Payments for Platforms) offers a unified interface to collect, hold, split, and disburse funds across multiple countries, currencies, and recipients, without requiring platforms to establish local entities or bank accounts.
Credible Finance — $150,000 worth of XLM*
Credible is a payment orchestration platform that enables US businesses and fintechs to collect and remit fiat from emerging markets with T+0 settlement, powered by stablecoin-based payment financing.
Automated Finance — $118,500 worth of XLM*
Automated Finance is a live Web3 automation platform enabling DAOs, startups, businesses and individuals to manage on‑chain treasury operations automatically.
JoonaPay — $90,000 worth of XLM*
JoonaPay is a B2B payments platform operating in Cote d’Ivoire with 6 live pilot customers and approximately $45K processed to date. We currently handle payment collection, disbursement, and reconciliation for small and medium businesses.
CashAbroad Smart Treasury– $90,000 worth of XLM*
CashAbroad uses Stellar as the settlement layer for enterprise stablecoin payment flows between international trade partners, enabling atomic settlement, deterministic fee logic, and interoperability between liquidity and ramp providers.
RFP Track
Targeted developer tooling needs — reviewed by the delegate panel only. 10 projects were awarded. Given the quality of proposals was high this round, 4 out of the 6 RFPs have been marked as fulfilled.
Smart Account Onboarding — $150,000 worth of XLM*
Smart Account Onboarding is an open-source reference implementation and onboarding standard that removes the primary adoption friction for Soroban smart accounts.
OBSRVR Prism — $79,999 worth of XLM*
OBSRVR Prism extends our existing open-source development block explorer — the Obsrvr Intelligence Console (Terminal) — with full Soroban-first capabilities.
Latch — $120,000 worth of XLM*
Latch provides open-source C-address onboarding infrastructure for Stellar, enabling users to create and fund Soroban Smart Accounts without ever touching a traditional G-address.
WASM Unboxer (Working Title) — $100,000 worth of XLM*
WASM Unboxer is reverse engineering a tool which will take compiled Soroban contracts in WASM format as input and emit accurate WAT, rust and extensive reproducible methods to test its accuracy.
RFP: Soroban (WASM) Specialized Reverse Engineering Tool — $120,000 worth of XLM*
This project builds specialized tooling to analyze and reverse engineer WASM contracts, improving security and developer transparency.
Prices API RFP — CTX — $138,000 worth of XLM*
Prices API RFP operates a pricing API that has served hundreds of millions of free queries with 99.99% uptime while powering multiple wallets and our own payments system.
OctoPos — DeFi Position API — $120,000 worth of XLM*
OctoPos is the first institutional vault infrastructure provider on Stellar, working on portfolio position tracking and net asset value calculation.
Orion — DeFi Positions API — $122,221 worth of XLM*
Orion (Defi Positions API) is a unified, semantic API that computes and serves a user’s total DeFi exposure across major Soroban protocols.
Rumble Fish Software Development — $131,200 worth of XLM*
Rumble Fish Software Development is a block explorer that supports displaying Soroban and classic operations in human-readable and context-rich formats to enhance trust in what’s happening on-chain.
KMP Stellar SDK — $14,000 worth of XLM*
KMP Stellar SDK adds passkey-based wallet creation, signer management, context rules, policy enforcement, and token transfers for OpenZeppelin smart account contracts on Stellar.
A huge congratulations to these incredible projects! Your innovation reflects the best of what our ecosystem can achieve. We’re excited to collaborate with you and help bring your ideas to life in a way that drives meaningful, lasting change.
*The USD valuation of the Award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker XLMUSD_RR) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR).
Project descriptions are based on information provided by award recipients or publicly available sources. SDF/SCF makes no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or compliance of any project description.
Referral Insights
SCF #41 marks the first round operating under SCF’s new referral program, which is a structured effort to surface high-quality teams through trusted ecosystem channels rather than open discovery alone. Of the 20 successful referrals this round, 8 came from SDF internally and 12 from external partners, community members, and previously funded SCF projects. The distribution reflects the program’s underlying logic: the people closest to the ecosystem are best positioned to identify teams worth supporting. Looking beyond this round, the program has already scaled meaningfully. Over 300 individuals have been onboarded as ecosystem scouts, extending SCF’s reach well beyond what centralized outreach could achieve on its own. As the program matures, referral conversion rates and submission quality from referred teams will be key signals for how it continues to shape the submission pool in future rounds.
Round Insights & Voting Dynamics
Since October 2023, the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) has utilized Neural Quorum Governance (NQG), a reputation-based voting mechanism to signal community sentiment in Award Allocation in the Community Vote phase of SCF Build (Open Track). Voting results are non-determinative, and final allocation decisions are made by the quarterly delegates panel.
With SCF 7.0, Community Vote now applies exclusively to Open Track submissions. This is by design: it focuses the community’s attention on the projects where broad input is most valuable, while Integration and RFP submissions — which require more specialized evaluation — are handled directly by the expert panel.
Round at a Glance
The result this round: 33 Open Track submissions reviewed by 94 voters, with 12 projects awarded. Four projects received unanimous active voter support — every voter who reviewed them directly voted Yes. The awarded projects span DeFi infrastructure, developer tooling, security, payments, and public goods — a healthy signal that the community is evaluating diverse ecosystem needs, not clustering around a single category. See full round results here.
The Community Signal
Every project the delegate panel awarded this round was also a top-ranked project in the NQG community vote — a first in the mechanism’s two-year history. Across the previous 11 rounds, NQG’s ranking matched panel decisions 88% of the time. SCF #41 closed that gap completely, with a clear cut-off at >85% approved NQG score.
Several factors contributed. The quorum algorithm redesign in SCF #39 resolved a long-standing challenge where delegated votes frequently resolved to Abstain, diluting the community signal. And the SCF 7.0 structure itself helped: fewer submissions meant less attention dilution and more considered voting from the community.
The top 5 voters held just 13.1% of total NQG — down from 43.6% from SCF #37. Voting outcomes are increasingly shaped by the broad community, not a handful of high-power voters. The current algorithm uses the full set of a voter’s delegates (minimum 7) with a simple majority threshold, making unresolved delegations structurally impossible. Learn more about Quorum Delegation in the SCF Handbook.
What Voters Said
New in SCF #41: voters must provide a reason when voting No. This creates a feedback loop that helps teams improve future submissions. Recurring themes this round:
- Ecosystem fit — the most common No reason. Projects that could have been submitted to any blockchain without modification faced the most pushback.
- Technical depth — voters scrutinized architecture docs closely. AI-generated documentation and lack of verifiable Soroban/Rust experience were flagged repeatedly.
- Budget proportionality — high budgets were forgiven when teams had clear Stellar track records; questioned when they didn’t.
- Traction evidence — projects without verifiable usage, partnerships, or demand signals faced skepticism at higher budget levels.
NQG Performance
NQG computes each voter’s power through layered neurons — modular reputation inputs that are summed and multiplied to produce a final score. In SCF #41, 94 voters participated across three community tiers: 54 Pathfinders (57%), 12 Navigators (13%), and 28 Pilots (30%).
The radar shows how differently NQG’s four neurons contribute across tiers. Pilots average 6.36 total voting power, drawing meaningful input from every neuron. Pathfinders — the majority — average 2.25, largely defined by their base Tier score with minimal contributions elsewhere. The sharpest differentiator is Voting History: Pilots average 0.59 (out of 0.99) while Pathfinders average just 0.03. Because this neuron acts as a multiplier on Layer 1, it amplifies all other reputation signals for consistent participants.
The Retro Vote Quality neuron — introduced in SCF #39 — now spans -0.65 to 3.80, its widest range yet. Pilots average 1.08 versus 0.35 for Pathfinders, reflecting both longer vote histories and a higher hit rate on supporting projects that reached mainnet.
The Tier neuron starts at a base of 1 (Pathfinder), 2 (Navigator), or 3 (Pilot), with bonuses for verified roles: +1 for SCF Project, SDF, Moderator, Ambassador President, or Public Good Contributor, and +0.5 for regional Ambassadors. This is why scores reach as high as 5.50. For full details on how tiers and roles map to voting power, see the Components & Parameters page.
Despite these per-tier differences, the overall system is becoming more equitable — the top 5 voters held just 13.1% of total NQG, down from 43.6% in #37. The Theil index — a standard measure of inequality used in economics — dropped to 0.14, the lowest in NQG’s history.
Looking Ahead
SCF #41 is the first round where we relied fully on voting outcome to determine award allocation, with a cut-off at >85% approved NQG score as agreed with the delegate panel. We’ll continue to monitor performance of future rounds to see if this is the right number, and if we can move towards a future where voting results are fully determinative.
For a full deep dive into NQG’s evolution over 20 rounds, see the Two Years of Neural Quorum Governance retrospective (link uploaded soon). To learn more about how NQG works and how to participate, visit the SCF Handbook. If you’re interested in participating in the community vote and helping to shape the future of the Stellar ecosystem, become verified today and participate in the discussion on the Stellar Dev Discord!
SCF #41 Round Recap was originally published in Stellar Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.