Start the morning with coffee and a quick bite.

Step into the heart of the Stellar ecosystem. Meet partners building on the network, sign up for Meridian Pay to earn lumens at the arcade and Made to Move gallery, pick up limited-edition merchandise, and catch CoinDesk and Tearsheet recording live.

Meridian's 8th edition starts here. Join the opening welcome and find out why Stellar is the network made to move.

Stellar Development Foundation leadership on the next 10 years on Stellar. Denelle Dixon, Nicolas Barry, Tomer Weller, Raja Chakravorti and José Fernández da Ponte will cover what it takes for Stellar to be the most reliable network in regulated finance, its path from infrastructure to real-world utility at scale, and how SDF will support the ecosystem building it.

DTCC sits at the center of global capital markets, and it's now helping shape how those markets move onchain. Nadine Chakar, Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets, joins for a conversation on what it takes to bring tokenization to institutional scale, and what the industry's core infrastructure providers are building next.

Welcome to the Douro Stage. Settle in for a day of conversations with the builders, institutions and innovators shaping what's next on Stellar.

Book one-on-one and small-group conversations with fellow attendees around the ideas that matter to you, from payments and tokenization to policy and building on Stellar. Schedule yours in the Meridian app.

What would you build if compute wasn't scarce? No sign-up required, first come, first seated.

This year, Stellar passed every developer ecosystem except Ethereum to become #2 in monthly active developers. This session looks at what drove the climb, including the role of developer support programs, and where they go from here.

The future of finance will be shaped by how traditional and digital infrastructure work together. This session explores how institutions are applying tokenization and digital asset technologies in practical ways, and how collaboration across financial institutions, market infrastructure providers and technology networks is helping create more efficient, connected and accessible markets.

An overview of the latest developments on Stellar, covering tokenized real-world assets, stablecoins, payments, and institutional adoption.

After the data comes the people behind it. Three longtime Stellar builders talk with our community lead about what keeps them on Stellar, what's gotten better and what they'd tell a team deciding where to build next.

Enjoy lunch and connect with fellow attendees.

Tokenization is only the beginning. Stellar is the network built for everything that comes after. Speakers from the Stellar Institutional Suite walk through how institutions issue, move and deploy assets on Stellar, putting them to work as collateral, yield and settlement across one network designed for the full lifecycle.

Two innovation leaders inside two long-established institutions explain how a new idea earns its first internal champion, survives scrutiny, and makes the jump from experiment to something the institution is prepared to back. This is the decision-making layer behind bringing an institution onchain: who has to say yes, what earns the next yes, and what kills an idea before it gets there.

Building the future of human connection is easier when value can be exchanged easily. Money is moving in new ways, but what does that change, and for whom? SDF Board member and VP of Meta FinTech, Ginger Baker explains what Meta is learning from exploring stablecoin rails and how agentic commerce is closing the last mile between discovery and purchase.

Digital money only automates business if the underlying data can be trusted. Evonik and PwC discuss lessons from industrial pilots, why validating transaction data between partners calls for a shared global infrastructure, and what it takes to build an ecosystem around it.

This talk explores how to design systems on Stellar that balance privacy, interoperability, and RWA requirements. Instead of exposing user data or relying on isolated permissioned setups, it shows how identity, compliance, and asset flows can move across networks while staying private and compliant.

SCF-Backed Builders take the stage. Teams pitching live in this block:

- Untangled

- XCCY

- Moonlight Protocol

- CryptoMate

- Soroswap

The question for tokenization is no longer if or when, but how much of the financial system it will ultimately reshape. Anthony Scaramucci, Founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital, joins for a candid conversation on where tokenization goes from here and what that means for investors and markets.

Smart wallets on Stellar have the protocol support, the standards and a growing ecosystem, but C addresses still aren't the default. SDF's Tyler van der Hoeven and Jake Urban debate what changes that: AI agents that need on-chain spending limits, or better interop for everyone. Expect a quick state of play, a real disagreement, and open Q&A on pushing C-address adoption forward. No sign-up required, first come, first seated.

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations. This session will feature:

- Redstone, on The $1T Catalyst for RWAs on Stellar

- WisdomTree, on treasury, payments, & remittances the onchain playbook and live use cases

- Archax, on $GOVY, the T-Bill that never stops working

- Etherfuse, on the power of local money that earns

- Redswan, on moving RWA forward with product, pipeline, and partnerships

Why locally denominated assets are required to bring the world onchain.

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations.

This session will feature:

- SG Forge, on EURCV on Stellar

- Rivool on distribution, the missing layer

SCF-Backed Builders take the stage. Teams pitching live in this block:

- GrantFox

- Trustless Work

- Piggy Wallet

- PagFinance

- ACTA

Join for afternoon bites and beverages.

AI is soaking up capital, headlines and pitch decks. But much of what makes a company worth backing (distribution, regulatory positioning, real revenue, trust) has nothing to do with the model underneath. Five active investors share what they're funding now, what they're passing on, and how founders building in payments and blockchain infrastructure can raise when every deck says "AI."

Across LATAM, Africa and Asia, demand for digital dollars and faster payments is outpacing the infrastructure built to serve it. Leaders building in these markets share their playbook for moving quickly, staying compliant as rules evolve and meeting users where the demand already is.

It's time for the judging! Our top HackMeridian projects are joining the Meridian main stage to pitch live — and face the scrutiny of the Stellar Shark Tank judges and the audience, who will get the vote on the People's Choice award.

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations.

This session will feature:

- Akuna, on building the business side of creativity

- Kredete, on global settlement to usable local money in emerging markets

Zama calls Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) "the HTTPS moment for public blockchains," the missing layer that lets institutions use public networks without exposing sensitive information or giving up openness and verifiability. In this fireside, leaders from Stellar Development Foundation and Zama discuss what bringing privacy to public blockchains means for payments, tokenized assets, and regulated finance.

SCF-Backed Builders take the stage. Teams pitching live in this block:

- KasiMoney

- FiatSend

- Microvault by Shamba Records

- Atram

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations. This session will feature:

-Oxbow, on unlocking institutional capital flows with shielded pools

-Open Zeppelin, on private transfers, public trust and the next era of regulated assets on Stellar

-Nethermind, on Stellar Private Payments: institutional-grade privacy on a public network

- Arcane and Predicate, on introducing the enterprise privacy stack on Stellar

How Stellar is taking up the challenge to produce faster blocks while increasing throughput and scaling up the validator network. A technical deep dive into various experiments that will bring the network latency down.

As global financial services move onchain, enterprises need infrastructure that can balance transparency with confidentiality. Getting this balance right will be critical to bringing more institutional financial activity onchain. Leaders from PwC, OpenZeppelin, Nethermind, and Blockdaemon will explore what onchain privacy needs to look like for enterprise finance and what it will take to bring financial activity onchain at scale.

This talk introduces Stellar's Quantum Preparedness Plan (QPP), a multi-stage roadmap for preparing the network for a post-quantum future. We highlight the recent addition of ML-DSA verification in Soroban, the first step toward quantum-safe authentication, and preview the protocol changes planned for subsequent stages of the roadmap. The talk will also briefly survey emerging approaches to post-quantum cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, along with several open technical questions. Finally, we will discuss how the broader Stellar ecosystem can participate in shaping the transition.

In just the past year, AI has put powerful hacking capabilities in the hands of anybody with an internet connection, creating a new and rapidly evolving threat to decentralized ecosystems. To stay ahead, defenders must fight fire with fire. Learn how SDF is building Gesserit and pioneering new approaches to AI-powered security.

With LLM agents driving the majority of code development and security, it is no longer feasible nor enough to have manual code reviews and external auditors. In this talk, we will show how to leverage agents to secure agentic code using agentic formal verification. We first demonstrate how agents can guide the development of formal specifications in an interactive loop with a human. The specification acts as a ground truth that can be used for formally verifying the code, automatically generating test inputs for fuzzing, and checking the equivalence between multiple versions of the implementation. This talk will focus on the first two uses. We present our agentic verifier, AutoProver, that we use to secure Soroban smart contracts against malicious humans and AI agents. We show our prototype working with multiple backends: Sunbeam, a dedicated Wasm-based automated formal verifier for Soroban, cargo-fuzz, Rust property testing tool, and Lean4 for verifying heavy numeric computations and cryptographic code. AutoProver mitigates one of the key challenges in practical formal verification: coming up with formal specifications. By doing so, it makes formal verification more accessible and easier to adapt.

SCF-Backed Builders take the stage. Teams pitching live in this block:

- Runtime Verification

- Tansu

- Webacy

- Merkle Science Platform for Soroban

- 57Blocks

No scripts, no filters—just the audience, the mic, and SDF’s top decision‑makers. Bring your burning questions and join a lively town hall where the you set the session agenda.

Start the morning with coffee and a quick bite.

Step into the heart of the Stellar ecosystem. Meet partners building on the network, sign up for Meridian Pay to earn lumens at the arcade and Made to Move gallery, pick up limited-edition merchandise, and catch CoinDesk and Tearsheet recording live.

Tejo is back for Day 2 and kicking it off with a series of can't miss news for the Stellar network.

Ten startups. Twelve weeks. One demo day. The first Stellar x CV Labs Accelerator cohort show what they've built for payments, FX, and trade across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

Book one-on-one and small-group conversations with fellow attendees around the ideas that matter to you, from payments and tokenization to policy and building on Stellar. Schedule yours in the Meridian app.

Will the person you just pitched remember your story after you leave the room? Bring your current pitch to this hands-on workshop for founders, builders, and BD leads. Learn four rules for winning over your audience, then put them to work. You’ll leave with a sharper story and the one idea your brand should own.

U.S. Bank launched USBDC, one of the first bank-issued stablecoins deployed on a public blockchain, and completed a live pilot transaction on Stellar that tested minting, redemption, freezing and clawback. Jamie Walker, Head of Digital Assets and Money Movement at U.S. Bank, shares how the bank moved value onchain while keeping it tied into its core finance, risk, compliance and operations infrastructure, and why that combination makes public networks viable for banks.

Open financial systems need two things: a way for people to hold and control their own assets, and rails that can move value anywhere. This session brings together MetaMask, the self-custody wallet that introduced millions of people to owning digital assets, and Stellar, a network built from the start for global payments, stablecoins and real-world assets. A conversation about where self-custody and global money movement meet, and what it takes to make open money usable at scale.

Open networks or walled gardens? The first stablecoins were built to move money. The next wave, digital versions of deposits, shares and funds, carries the full rights of the real thing. Add AI agents that shop for the best rate on your behalf, and the infrastructure choices made now will decide who can build, who can compete and who keeps the value.

Stablecoin settlement works. The harder part is everything around it: originating funds compliantly in the sending market, paying out in local currency at the destination, and holding the licenses to do both.

Get the first look at what's next for Freighter: see what’s changing and how we're building to serve everyday users while giving developers a new way to reach them.

H1 2026 was the most-hacked six months in Web3 history, attacks are more frequent and more sophisticated, but most security still starts after the damage is done. In this roundtable, Blockaid and SDF bring together institutions, protocols, wallets, payment providers and builders to dig into what it really takes to stop attacks before they land. This will be an open conversation about the latest wave of exploits and proactive strategies to stay ahead of what comes next. No sign-up required, first come, first seated.

Centrifuge and Janus Henderson open the second day of Meridian on the main stage for a conversation on bringing institutional funds onchain and what it takes to build the products the next wave of capital markets will run on.

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations.

This session will feature:

- Decaf, on stablecoins delivering real-world impact

- Meru, on builting the next generation of financial services

Enjoy lunch and connect with fellow attendees.

Airtm and BVNK have partnered to combine Airtm’s last-mile network in the Global South with BVNK’s enterprise stablecoin infrastructure. Through the newly launched Airtm Connect, the collaboration enables seamless, wallet-native payments that connect reliable global on-ramps directly to local commerce. Attendees will learn how this joint initiative eliminates payment friction and expands financial access across emerging markets.

This talk shares lessons from building a unified indexer for Stellar Classic data and Soroban smart contracts. It covers approaches to smart contract classification and state tracking, the pitfalls along the way, and the alternatives worth considering.

Onchain, exploits can unfold in seconds, and the best defense is knowing what to watch before anything happens. This workshop will break down who should own monitoring, how a threat model translates directly into actionable signals, and how SDF's AppSec team is building the playbook for protocols that can respond in real time. No sign-up required, first come, first seated.

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations.

This session will feature:

- Ctrl Alt on tokenizing the world's largest asset class

- Taurus on Stellar, stablecoins and postquantum

- Cobre and Meru on direct stablecoin ramps to LatAm's instant rails.

SCF-Backed Builders take the stage. Teams pitching live in this block:

- DCENT Wallet

- Syklo

- SocketFi: Smart Wallet Infra on Stellar

- Coala Pay Billy Wallet

Stellar RPC now serves full ledger history, and ingests faster than before, thanks to a ground-up rebuild of its storage layers. This talk covers what changed, how it benchmarks against the old, and what full history unlocks.

You write a few ordinary Rust functions, add #[contractimpl], and build. Out comes a Wasm file that runs on Stellar, describes its own interface, and can be tested as plain Rust. Join us as we look under the hood at how that happens, and at the Rust features that let macros do more than they normally can. Whether you’re writing your first contract or building tools for other developers, you’ll see what’s happening one layer down, and leave with patterns you can use in your own Rust code. We hope it sparks ideas for what you could build.

StellarExpert has grown from a block explorer into a comprehensive data platform for the Stellar network. This session walks through the comprehensive toolkit available to developers, analysts, and ecosystem participants. We'll cover real-time ledger data, account activity tracking, asset analytics, DEX trading history, network statistics, and much more – all accessible through the web interface and API. Whether you're building a wallet, running compliance checks, or analyzing on-chain trends, or simply want to check what’s happening on-chain, StellarExpert provides the data layer you need. We'll also present the newly available commercial API access tier and what it means for production-grade applications.

Crypto In America goes live at Meridian with former CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam and SDF CEO Denelle Dixon. They’ll look at U.S. influence on global crypto rules, lessons from the Clarity Act, whether regulators can fill the legislative gap, and where the industry goes next.

SCF-Backed Builders take the stage. Teams pitching live in this block:

- Rumblefish

- Inference

- 57Blocks

- Websoroban IDE

- Stellar Index

As rules for digital assets take shape around the world, product teams are deciding how much to build for today's regulation and how much to leave room for tomorrow's. Our panelists share how they design products that meet the bar for regulators and institutions without slowing innovation.

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations.

This session will feature:

- PaltaLabs, on how to offer financial services without building the underlying infrastructure from scratch.

Institutional allocators want onchain yield, and DeFi wants institutional capital, yet the two rarely meet. Patrick, founder of Surus, explains why a licensed layer in the middle can move money both ways when better smart contracts can’t. He’ll walk through what it takes for RIAs, platforms and vault curators to work across that divide today.

Join for afternoon bites and beverages.

Institutions ask one question before anything else: will this hold up with a regulator? Candace Kelly makes the case that Stellar was built with that question in mind, from issuer controls in the protocol to shared identity standards and privacy configurable to each use case. She reads the 2026 regulatory map, from MiCA to US stablecoin rules, and what it means for public networks.

DeFi has spent years competing for the same crypto-native users on the same chains. The next growth phase comes from real-world money: payments, stablecoins, tokenized assets, fintechs and institutions. The panel asks why builders are choosing Stellar to reach them.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands stretches across more than 1,000 islands in the Pacific, where access to cash and banking has long been limited. USDM1, a U.S. dollar-denominated sovereign bond backed one-to-one by U.S. Treasuries and issued natively on Stellar, now powers government benefits across the country and is gaining traction with institutions as collateral. This fireside will discuss on how the country is using USDM1 to extend access to the dollar, broaden financial access at home, and set a model for responsible sovereign finance on-chain.

When banks close, currencies collapse, or infrastructure disappears, money still has to move — and in Venezuela, Haiti, and Syria, it's moving on Stellar. Three practitioners working inside three very different crises — an imminent collapse, a decades-long emergency, and a post-conflict rebuild — on what it actually takes to restart an economy from the ground up.

Institutions aren't asking whether to go onchain anymore. They're asking what to do once they're there. Leaders from Securitize, Fireblocks and SDF share how banks and asset managers want to put tokenized assets to work, from collateral and yield to 24/7 settlement.

AI agents can reason, use tools, and act on our behalf, but what happens when they can pay? This talk explores how x402 and MPP enable AI agents to transact autonomously, and how Stellar can power the emerging machine-to-machine economy.

Tokenization is no longer a question of if. The question now is whether it makes markets work better. Emilio Anting of Franklin Templeton and Max J. Heinzle, CEO of 21X Group, discuss how grBenji, a natively tokenized money market fund, trades and settles on a regulated venue, and what tokenized cash needs next, from yield generation to collateral.

Blindly pointing an LLM at a data warehouse often produces plausible looking, wrong SQL. Nothing errors and the failures are silent, instead, we built a semantic layer that sits between the model and our data warehouse so a model picks fields instead of writing queries. This talk walks through examples of silent failures that look correct at first glance, the steps we took to avoid having an LLM write raw SQL off of tables, and a demo with open source tools that can be easily replicated.

The infrastructure is live, but institutional adoption still isn't moving at full speed. Kaiko and Cantor Fitzgerald name the gaps that remain, from liquidity and market data to payments rails and regulatory clarity, and what it will take to close them.

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping cybersecurity faster than organizations can adapt. This presentation examines the emerging risks and the implications of technological dependency. Drawing on real-world incidents, it argues for a shift toward continuous defense, stronger oversight, and resilient architectures. As new technologies challenge existing assumptions, the central message is clear: we already know many of the measures needed to protect ourselves, and the time to act is now!

AI agents are confident about Stellar and often wrong: outdated docs, deprecated patterns, projects that no longer exist. Stellar Raven gives any agent one connection to the official docs, live ecosystem data, community intel and tested playbooks, cross-referenced into answers with sources. Tyler van der Hoeven shows what's under the hood, what months of real use have proven, and why it's as useful for research and discovery as it is for writing code.

Intraday repo lets institutions borrow against collateral for minutes or hours instead of overnight, and it is the first step towards always-on secured funding that keeps running through evenings, weekends and holidays, when today's markets are shut. This session demonstrates an intraday repo trade involving Stellar-based assets, orchestrated by Ownera's FinP2P Router, and discusses what continuous funding means for the future of treasury management at banks, cash lenders and asset managers.

SCF-Backed Builders take the stage. Teams pitching live in this block:

- Peridot Finance

- AllowIt

- Rozo

Join us for rapid fire Lightning Talks, where Stellar ecosystem companies share everything you need to know about the latest innovations.

This session will feature:

- Spiko on where $3B of tokenized cash equivalents comes from.

- Figure Markets on the verticalized stack, how Figure brings credit, cash and yield to Stellar.

- Ascend Markets on the first live institutional repo on Stellar mainnet and how they kept it rolling through the weekend, while markets were closed. How did it work and what does onchain prime brokerage means for anyone looking to put tokenized assets to work?

As Meridian comes to a close, the momentum doesn't stop. Join us for a look at what's next for Stellar, including a special announcement and the celebration of this year's Shark Tank and i³ Award winners.