For those who missed the intro at Stellar Meridian 2021 – Tomer Weller, VP at tech strategy at the Stellar Development Foundation:

Denelle Dixon Question:  What do we see that is not in the ecosystem that is not on the Stellar Network that told us about what we needed to do for the future?

Tomer Weller:  The first thing I want to say is that Stellar is doing great.  It is a super robust network, super dependable, never misses a beat.  And, its interoperability allows for Anchors around the world to introduce on-ramps very fast and efficiently.

Money Gram is a great example for that.  I think in a short month, Money gram moved from just signing up a partnership with us all the way to launching a functional pilot.  So, that is pretty amazing. With that said, there is a lot of financial innovation happening in our space.

AMMs were a good start. And, we need to figure out what are the next steps for these types of innovation and how they sit well in Stellar.

The other thing is, we are living in a multichain world, but there are lot of really interesting blockchains. A lot of solutions being built.  I am going to make sure that Stellar users have access to these other chains.  We have always been about interoperability with traditional finance and now we need to think about cryptocurrency.

Denelle Dixon:  I know, we are not yet at 2022, but what does this mean by the way you have looked at the ecosystem needs with a focus here and also outside what does it mean for 2022?

Tomer Weller:  We are introducing something called SpeedX in to the Stellar Protocol.  SpeedX is an innovative DEX approach batch trading. It really changes how trading works. I would recommend watching the tech talk at Meridian at Stellar ORG.

So, SpeedX is one thing, it is really going to help democratize access to liquidity pools, it is also going to help set us up for the scalability needs of the network. In addition, we are looking at bridges so I said we need to be expanding the interoperability withing cryptocurrency ecosystems.  The way to do that is to trust minimize bridges.  We are looking at various solutions both supporting ongoing ecosystem efforts like Flair, Pendulum. We are also giving a talk in Meridian. I recommend checking that out.

We are launching an internal passport in the SDF to allocate engineering resources to make sure that Stellar is a great network to build bridges on. And, I am also happy to announce that we are starting a new bounty program for developers. And, the first bounty is going to be for building bridges. We are going to talk a bit about that tomorrow at the Meridian.

And, obviously we still need to keep Stellar the most robust network out there, both Stellar Core and Horizon are doing great, we need to make sure that they enable the growth of the network, because we are seeing a lot of on-chain activity this past year.