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 a two-step panel review process and community vote.
SCF #43 continues under SCF 7.0, a significant structural shift that introduced 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 across all three tracks. Thank you to all submitters and reviewers for your hard work!
29 projects were awarded across all three tracks with a total of $3,139,069 worth of XLM. 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. 10 of 39 submissions were awarded.
lend.xyz — $120,560 worth of XLM*
Lend is building infrastructure designed to support complaince for tokenized real estate on-chain.
Pipeline — $140,000 worth of XLM*
Pipeline is a decentralized commodity trade finance platform that facilitates commodity trade finance on-chain, with transactions backed by underlying commodity assets.
Talwex — $150,000 worth of XLM*
Talwex is building blockchain-based infrastructure for bond trading, designed to facilitate settlement and secondary market activity, while automating key post-trade functions such as compliance, reporting, holder registries and coupon and principal distributions.
Stellar Oracle Shield by Sun Zu Lab — $120,000 worth of XLM*
Stellar Oracle Shield is an independent, real-time oracle quality monitoring and market health assessment platform purpose-built for the Stellar and Soroban DeFi ecosystem.
XCCY — $141,125 worth of XLM*
XCCY is an institutional-grade protocol for fixed-rate borrowing and lending built as a layer on top of lending, enabling users to access fixed-rate deposit and loan terms and hedge variable rate volatility using on-chain interest rate swaps.
Stabble — $144,100 worth of XLM*
Stabble is a high-velocity liquidity layer for Stellar that provides the infrastructure required to scale institutional-grade DeFi infrastructure, using “Smart Math” StableSwap invariants on Soroban to deliver low slippage for 1:1 stable asset pairs.
REAPP — Real Agentic Payments Protocol — $70,000 worth of XLM*
REAPP is an infrastructure protocol that enables AI agents to securely transact on the Stellar network without direct private key custody.
TERWA — $97,240 worth of XLM*
TERWA is a a project that explores tokenization of real-world assets in the wine production sector.
ProofBridge — $150,000 worth of XLM*
ProofBridge is a peer-to-peer zero knowledge powered cross-chain bridge that makes cross-chain transfers as trust-minimised as the underlying blockchains.
XOXNO — New Lending Foundation protocol — $135,000 worth of XLM*
XOXNO is an enterprise-grade decentralized lending protocol that opens up advanced on-chain capital strategies to more market participants through a clean and intuitive UI/UX, with plans to integrate RWA markets.
Integration Track
Projects building on existing ecosystem tools — reviewed by the delegate panel only. 19 of 30 submissions were awarded.
SeevCash — $149,360 worth of XLM*
SeevCash is on a mission to make payments much more accessible and affordable for the unbanked in Africa and abroad by using stablecoins.
Turbolong — $99,000 worth of XLM*
Turbolong is a rading platform on Stellar that enables leveraged positions on Blend Protocol pools through atomic recursive lending loops, with sub-5-second finality and up to 12.9× leverage.
Seasonal Workers Payroll (TuCambio) — $100,000 worth of XLM*
TuCambio digitizes payroll for migrant and seasonal workers, enabling employers to generate payroll while workers receive wages in stablecoins on Stellar with Web3-linked debit cards and cross-border remittance access.
Fundable Finance — $96,499 worth of XLM*
Fundable Finance is an on-chain financial operations platform for global teams, enabling automated payouts, payment streaming, and seamless crypto-to-fiat offramping across emerging markets.
InveStar — $141,325 worth of XLM*
InveStar is a fintech platform that enables users to route remittance transfers via Stellar, with optional features to set aside a portion of funds for saving or other financial goals.
CryptoMate — $140,000 worth of XLM*
CryptoMate is a platform that enables emerging fintechs, community leaders, entrepreneurs, and SMEs to launch, run, and monetize their own financial services, with cash-to-VISA card flows settled as USDC on Stellar via MoneyGram Ramps.
Figo — $75,000 worth of XLM*
Figo gives global workers and creators instant access to a virtual Visa card and USD account in 50+ countries, no crypto knowledge needed.
Sava — $125,000 worth of XLM*
Sava is a non-custodial savings app built on Stellar where Turkish users deposit Lira, access USDC lending opportunities through Blend Protocol pools, and see everything in ₺.
D’CENT Wallet — $50,000 worth of XLM*
D’CENT is Korea’s only hardware wallet maker with 1,050,000+ users, building on Stellar to drive USDT liquidity, RWA, and DeFi adoption in Korea through an in-app Alliance Portal, on-chain quests, and a Stellar X Edition device.
Fewticket — $65,000 worth of XLM*
Fewticket is a digital ticketing and access control platform designed to modernize event management across Africa and emerging markets.
WOWMAX — $98,560 worth of XLM*
WOWMAX is building a decentralized bridge connecting Ethereum and Stellar, enabling users to move stablecoins (USDC, USDT, DAI) between ecosystems without relying on centralized intermediaries.
Fiatsend — $92,000 worth of XLM*
Fiatsend is a global mobile money account that lets people hold digital dollars and local currency, send to any mobile money account, and participate in DeFi protocols through a simple phone-number based experience.
VANK Anchor — $96,800 worth of XLM*
VANK is a multicurrency B2B payments platform for US-LatAm trade, building VANK Anchor — a Stellar Anchor for Colombia enabling USDC-COP on/off ramp via PSE for ecosystem wallets and fintechs through SEP-24.
Bloccpay — $100,000 worth of XLM*
Bloccpay is a stablecoin-powered cross-border payroll and invoicing platform built for emerging markets.
JetPad — $74,500 worth of XLM*
JetPad is expanding financial access for unbanked and underbanked youth in Africa by transforming stablecoins into a fully usable, everyday financial system.
Blockroll — $125,000 worth of XLM*
Blockroll is a stablecoin-powered neobank for Nigerian freelancers, creators, and remote workers receiving international payments.
Dig — $75,000 worth of XLM*
Dig has developed a Web3 analytics and trading platform designed to explore and interpret on-chain data across multiple blockchains.
Linq — $78,000 worth of XLM*
Linq is a payments infrastructure startup enabling users in Nigeria (eventually across Africa) to spend stablecoins like cash.
Bexo Wallet — $90,000 worth of XLM* Bexo Wallet is a self-custody super-app for Latin America bringing native Stellar USDC, an Argentine peso ramp, and QR merchant payments to one of the region’s highest-demand dollarization markets.
RFP Track (Developer Tooling)
Targeted developer tooling needs — reviewed by the delegate panel only on a quarterly basis. RFP Track submissions are now open for SCF #44 for the Q2 2026 RFPs.
A huge congratulations to these incredible projects! Your innovation reflects the best of what our ecosystem can achieve. We’re excited to support your work in a way that drives meaningful, lasting change.
Referral Insights
SCF #43 is the third round run end-to-end under the SCF Referral Program, which turns informal sourcing into a structured, attributable pipeline. This round, 22 of the 29 awarded projects came through referrals. As the program matures into SCF #44, the focus shifts from onboarding to alignment between referrer conviction and quality projects.
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.
Round at a Glance
The result this round: 10 of 39 Open Track submissions were awarded by the delegate panel, with the community vote covering 22 of those submissions and reviewed by 100 voters. SCF #43 holds the second-highest voter count in NQG history — within a hair of last round’s record of 106 — and includes 30 first-time voters alongside 70 returning participants. See all public data in this spreadsheet.
The Community Signal
For the third consecutive round, every project the delegate panel awarded was also a top-ranked project in the NQG community vote — extending the 100% alignment for the third consecutive round (first achieved in SCF #41),
The separation between awarded and non-awarded was the cleanest yet: every awarded project crossed 82% VP-weighted approval, and a 12-point gap separated the lowest awarded project from the highest non-awarded one (Unlock Onchain Finance for Institutions at 70%). With SCF 7.0 keeping the community vote scoped to Open Track, voters could again focus their attention on a small set of 22 submissions rather than being spread across all tracks.
Decentralization Measure
The top 5 voters held just 12.5% of total NQG voting power — down slightly from 12.7% in SCF #42 and a long way from 43.6% in SCF #37. Voting outcomes continue to be shaped by the broad community rather than a small set of high-power voters. The Gini coefficient — a standard measure of inequality where 0 means perfect equality — eased to 0.33, and the Theil index ticked down to 0.18. Both inched back toward last round’s distribution after the new-voter influx in #42 had nudged them upward. The pattern is the one we expected: as the 30 first-time voters who joined this round build voting history and earn Vote Quality signal in future rounds, the gap continues to compress.
Quorum Delegation
NQG allows voters to delegate their vote to a quorum of trusted community members rather than voting directly on every submission. Each voter selects a panel of delegates (min. 7); if enough delegates participate and a supermajority approves the project (>66.7%), the delegation resolves to Yes.
In SCF #43, delegation remained the dominant mode of participation: 74% of all vote-slots were delegated, with 65% of voters relying entirely on delegation and another 17% using a mix of direct voting and delegation. 18% of voters cast direct votes on every submission. This split is by design — delegation lets the broader community participate meaningfully even when individual voters lack the time or context to evaluate every project.
The system performed flawlessly again this round. All 1,623 delegated vote-slots resolved successfully — a 100% resolution rate for the third consecutive round, with zero abstains in the final tally. The pool of active delegates expanded notably this round: 18 active delegates (up from 11 in SCF #42) served a voter base of 100, with each voter selecting an average of 8 delegates for their quorum. The wider delegate pool means each delegate carries less concentrated weight, which strengthens the quorum’s robustness — no single delegate’s absence or shift can swing an outcome on its own.
Neuron Performance
NQG computes each voter’s influence through four “neurons” — modular reputation inputs that reflect different dimensions of a voter’s standing in the ecosystem (see exact parameters in the SCF Handbook).
One algorithmic update this round. The Retro Vote Quality neuron previously produced an unbounded linear sum of tranche-status bonuses, meaning long-tenured voters with many resolved votes could accumulate effectively unlimited RVQ. The fix wraps that same sum in a generalised logistic curve — preserving the relative ordering between voters but capping the top end and softening the long tail. The data this round confirms the bound is working as intended: the maximum Vote Quality score this round is 4.40 (down from 5.05 in #42, which would otherwise have continued climbing), the average across all voters is essentially unchanged at 0.97 (vs 1.02 in #42), and for the first time in the post-update window we see a small negative score appear (−0.02) — confirming the curve preserves penalty as well as reward signal. Because the curve only diverges from the previous linear sum at the upper end of accumulated tranche bonuses, the change had no material effect on this round’s award outcomes — its impact will compound in future rounds as long-tenured voters approach the cap.
In SCF #43, 100 voters participated across three community tiers: roughly 59% Pathfinders, 9% Navigators, and 32% Pilots. The Navigator population shrank notably this round (from 16 to 9), while Pathfinder and Pilot counts held steady. The radar chart above shows how each tier’s voting power breaks down across the four neurons:
- Reputation — Base power from the verified tier and other community roles. This is the largest contributor across all tiers, making up ~78% of a Pathfinder’s power, ~80% for Navigators, and ~62% for Pilots. It’s the “floor” that every verified community member starts with.
- Trust Graph — Derived from peer trust relationships via PageRank. Near-zero for Pathfinders and Navigators (<2% combined), contributing ~3% of Pilot power. The trust graph’s total contribution to round-wide VP was lower this round than last (1.8% vs 5.1% of total VP), driven by fewer non-zero scores rather than any change in the neuron’s formula.
- Vote Quality — A retroactive bonus or penalty based on whether the projects you voted for actually shipped on mainnet. Now in its fifth active round and operating under the new logistic curve, the neuron’s range is now naturally bounded. Pilots average roughly 4x the Vote Quality score of Pathfinders, reflecting both longer vote histories and better track records.
- Voting History — A participation consistency score. Still the sharpest tier differentiator: Pilots average a 0.59 multiplier (out of a max of 0.99) while Pathfinders average just 0.05.
Pilots average 7.2 total voting power — roughly 3x that of Pathfinders (2.4) — not because the system arbitrarily favors them, but because they’ve accumulated trust, voted consistently, and backed projects that shipped. The system is designed so that new participants start with a meaningful voice through reputation, and grow their influence over time by participating and making good decisions.
Looking Ahead
SCF #43 marks the third consecutive round of perfect alignment between the NQG community vote and the delegate panel — and the third consecutive round of zero unresolved delegations. With 100 voters (the second-highest count in NQG history) and the Vote Quality neuron now bounded by a logistic curve, the system is demonstrating sustained scale, stability, and discipline against long-term drift in voter influence.
This round flagged three calibration questions worth a deeper neuron audit and potential adjustments for SCF #44:
- First, the Trust Graph neuron has steadily lost weight: it contributed ~17% of total VP at SCF #40 (absolute trust-VP ~59), and just ~2% at #43 (~7.5) — an 8× compression in absolute terms over three rounds, with no change to the neuron’s formulas. We’d like to inspect the underlying trust-graph snapshot and edge counts to understand whether community trust-attestation activity has genuinely thinned out, or whether the HTB amplification is no longer firing as designed.
- Second, Reputation now contributes ~69% of total VP across all voters — high enough that we should sanity-check whether tier and role bonuses are crowding out the other three neurons, or whether that’s the intended weighting now that Vote Quality and Voting History have matured.
- Third, with Vote Quality now logistic-bounded, we’ll track whether the new curve preserves the rank ordering we want and whether the penalty tail is too sparse to provide a meaningful disincentive.
For a full deep dive into NQG’s evolution, see the 2.5 Years of Neural Quorum Governance retrospective (link coming 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!
*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. Inclusion in this recap does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or investment advice by SDF or SCF with respect to any project, token, protocol, or digital asset. Readers should conduct independent due diligence.
SCF #43 Round Recap was originally published in Stellar Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.