Stellar and it's Ecosystem - Levai Agbara

Um my name is Levi. I a blockchain developer. I'm also the lead de for Stella West Africa. Um today I'll be here to talk about uh Stella and its ecosystem. Basically talking about Stella and its ecosystem.

Uh the kind of opportunities that available on Stella, the kind of projects you can expect to see on Stella and how you can actually get involved with uh the Stella ecosystem. All right. First of all, what is Stella? Stellar is an open financial network designed to create equitable access to the global financial system. In simpler English, what this means is that Stella as a blockchain is built for financial use cases.

It's optimized and it has integrations that make it perfect to build like D5 products. It actually gives you features and again has integrations that actually make like your D5 products work better. Stella provides infrastructure for developers to issue assets, build application, deploy decentralized financial protocol and enables connections to real world assets, payment rails and cash. Already we know that like all blockchains do this, right? But the difference is on Stella, Stella has a decentralized exchange bu directly to its core.

What this means is that on Stella, you don't actually need smart contracts to perform all the operations. Basic operations like issuing assets, part payments, claimable balances, predicates, actually up to 26 operations on Stella can be done by simply sending an HTTP request to the network. You don't need to know how to write smart contracts to build basic applications on Stellar.

Stella allows people all over the world to make payments, convert assets, and move from cash to define a borderless economy. uh because of the amount of integration Stella has with off-chain platforms, off-chain financial protocols like Mon, Visa and the likes, it means that you can actually convert your assets, move uh your assets around, actually on-ramp and off-ramp uh your crypto to fiat without actually leaving uh the blockchain. Like you don't need to have like a Binance account or an account on any centralized platform to actually convert from crypto to fiat. You can actually do it all on Stella because most of all these integrations use Stella for settlement.

Currently Stella has been around since 2014. So as you can imagine there are like a lot of projects on Stella ecosystems. Globally we have like over 160 plus asset issuers. We have over 100 D5 protocols over 200 end user applications and over 120 plus infrastructure providers. is like you can actually already know that the ecosystem and the platform itself is dynamic and it's actually uh it's actually a vibrant ecosystem.

There's as much as Stella is optimized for um financial use cases, it's also general use. Anything you want to build on any platform, you can actually build it on Stella already. Recently, we have integrated with Visa. So you can actually find stable coins like um EURC and PI USD available from Visa natively on stellar. You als we also have um ZK integration that allows you to settle um settle and verify um finalize blocks from Ethereum directly on Stellar.

We also have u gas-free transactions in our native in some of our native wallets which means that as users you don't need to pay gas fees to move money around on stellar wallets. We also have uh increased hardware support for XLM. Hardware wallets like Trezor actually allow you to um hold um Stella native assets on the platform and egg actually lets you convert like an old phone currently like for Android only to use as a Stella wallet as a secure Stella wallet. We also recently integrated with Telegram wallet to actually support um XLM and other native assets on Stella. Thank you.

Uh presently like I mentioned we have like a lot of projects globally but you know this is West Africa we need to focus on like our own local project. So there's currently Upesa. Upsa is a self self-custody digital wallet that allows you to pay bills, send payments, shop online and perform any other transactions. We have Blockstage. Block stage is an event and community management platform that allows you to host events, sell tickets and actually grow your community on chain.

We have code pay. Code pay is a web three powered platform that allows you as an employer to manage payments with your employee on board staff manage payroll provide employee contracts and whatnot. And we have link. Link. We have link.

Uh link actually allows you to move money from uh Stellar to Moneygram and other offra other offchain platforms that integrated with Stella. So with all this said, what kind of opportunities can you find in the Stella ecosystem? Currently there's the SCF grants. Uh we've organized 39 38 rounds and we in the 39 round. The SCF grant is divided into two categories.

There is Kickstart, which allows you to turn an idea you have into like a workable product, and you can get up to $15,000 in funding to actually bring your idea to life. Then there's the second tier, which is build, which is for people that have workable products that need support or funding, and you can actually get up to $150,000 in XLM to actually to actually build your project. Currently for West African projects between last year and this year they've been awarded a cumulative sum of over $250,000 to build on Stella. Then there is our bug bounty program like on other blockchains. Uh if you can find vulnerabilities and whatnot in um Stella protocols and any of Stella related code bases.

We can actually get up to $250,000 worth of worth of XLM. And there are hackathons. There's currently a Stella hack hackathon ongoing. So if you actually if you're actually a developer and you would like to learn more about like the hackathons, you can follow build on stellar for like recent updates or yeah recent updates on stellar. So how can you actually get involved in the stellar ecosystem?

You can scan this link and it will take you to like a link tree on how to join the community, how to participate, how to contribute to the community and how to find like other ending opportunities that are not mentioned here. Or you can actually come down to our booth at the back if you have like personal questions or anything you need to know about like Stella ecosystem. Thank you for your time.