- Stellar had a packed week, with State Street and Galaxy announcing that their SWEEP tokenized private liquidity fund would launch on the network.
- Figure launched YLDS, the first yield-bearing stablecoin on Stellar, while others like Mesh, Aquarius and Merkl expanded their products on the network.
It was an action-packed week for the Stellar network yet again. The project attracted some of the world’s largest financial companies to deploy their products on its network, while existing companies announced landmark partnerships and new products.
Weekly round-up time ðŸ¤
Here's what happened this week in the Stellar ecosystem.
— Stellar (@StellarOrg) May 8, 2026
One of the biggest announcements in the past week was by State Street, one of the largest financial institutions globally, with over $5 trillion in assets under custody. State Street announced that it had partnered with Galaxy Digital to launch the Onchain Liquidity Sweep Fund, known as SWEEP. While it launched initially on Solana, State Street announced that it would launch it on Stellar and Ethereum in the coming weeks.
Stellar’s record with large institutions is impressive. As ETHNews reported, the network has the highest number of users for Franklin Templeton’s $2 billion BENJI tokenized fund, with $638 million of asset value.
Elsewhere, Stellar got its first yield-bearing stablecoin this week. Figure launched YLDS to combine stablecoin liquidity with ‘money market-style yield,’ making it available across Latin America, where currency depreciation and political instability make the US dollar a valuable asset. With YLDS, hundreds of millions of LATAM residents can access the USD via their favorite fintechs and hedge against local currencies.
The first regulated yield-bearing dollar product is now live on Stellar.@Figure's YLDS combines stablecoin liquidity with money-market-style yield — now available to fintechs and neobanks serving LATAM, where dollar savings access matters most. pic.twitter.com/gqJ68QwHD5
— Stellar (@StellarOrg) May 5, 2026
As we reported, Stellar is an ideal network for YLDS as it processed $55.6 billion in stablecoin payments last year. It also hosts over $2 billion in tokenized real-world assets, including products from Franklin Templeton and WisdomTree.
Stellar Builds Credit Infrastructure for RWAs
In yet another landmark moment, the Stellar Development Foundation announced that it had invested $1 million in Ascend to help build credit infrastructure for real-world assets.
Today, Ascend is announcing a strategic partnership with the Stellar Development Foundation (@StellarOrg), including a direct investment of US$1 million in Ascend.
The work is centered on a simple market question: what comes after tokenization?
Ascend is being built to help… pic.twitter.com/0FcSuto3ZO
— Ascend (@AscendFi) May 4, 2026
As we reported, the new product will offer investors onchain credit markets where RWAs will be subjected to institutional compliance standards.
RWAs have grown massively this year. According to a new report from CoinGecko, RWAs have more than tripled since the start of last year, surging from $5.4 billion to $19.3 billion. In Q1, investors traded $15.1 billion, overtaking the $14.8 billion they transacted in the first six months of last year.
Mesh, a leading crypto payment network, also announced its integration with Stellar this week. Its users can now use Stellar as a core settlement layer.
The week also saw some of the projects already building on Stellar expand their products. Aquarius, one of the DeFi protocols building on Stellar, announced that it was launching concentrated liquidity pools. It says these will be more capital-efficient as liquidity providers can set a specific price range for their capital instead of spreading it across the price curve.
1/ Concentrated liquidity pools are now live on Aquarius!
We added a new pool type on Aquarius — a fundamentally more efficient way to provide and use liquidity.https://t.co/7VHBu7hwQO pic.twitter.com/qEzRylWQMO
— Aquarius (AQUA) (@AquariusDeFi) May 1, 2026
