This Country Is Going Onchain — And Ripple Rival Stellar Just Landed The Deal

The Stellar Development Foundation and the Government of Bermuda have announced that the island nation will begin moving key payment and financial services activity onto the Stellar network — marking the first operational milestone in Bermuda’s stated ambition, declared at the World Economic Forum in January 2026, to become the world’s first fully on-chain national economy.

The partnership, announced via Stellar’s official press release, is not a pilot study or a working group. It is the beginning of a live deployment. Bermudian residents will be able to receive wages, pay local merchants, settle government fees, and hold, send, and receive digital assets through digital wallets on the Stellar network.

Government agencies expect to pilot stablecoin-based payments. Financial institutions will be able to integrate tokenization tools. Social service disbursements are also being explored as a use case, per the announcement.

The economic case behind the move is concrete. Local merchants on the island currently pay between 3% and 5% per transaction in card processing fees, with effective costs reaching as high as 10% in some categories, according to the press release.

The absence of mobile money infrastructure and continued reliance on legacy payment rails has left Bermudians absorbing costs that, in the SDF’s framing, represent value leaving the island rather than circulating within it.

The Hon. E. David Burt, Premier of Bermuda, addressed the issue directly in the announcement, noting that digital dollars and Stellar’s infrastructure make it possible to deliver this kind of systemic change responsibly and at the scale Bermuda requires.

Stellar’s selection is not incidental. The network was purpose-built for regulated financial services — public and permissionless by design, but configurable with the asset controls that sovereign and institutional deployments require, per the press release.

Transactions settle in seconds at fractions of a US cent. The network also operates one of the world’s largest cash on and off-ramp networks for digital assets, a feature that matters significantly for an island economy dependent on accessible liquidity channels.

Bermuda’s regulatory foundation further supports the choice. The island established the Digital Asset Business Act in 2018 — one of the world’s earliest comprehensive digital asset regulatory frameworks — giving the SDF a jurisdiction with existing legal infrastructure rather than a blank slate.

Denelle Dixon, CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation, noted in the release that Bermuda has assembled what most jurisdictions cannot: regulatory clarity, an aligned ecosystem, and a government willing to lead.

The announcement is not Stellar’s first sovereign deployment. The Republic of the Marshall Islands completed the world’s first nationwide onchain disbursement of universal basic income via USDM1 on the Stellar network in December 2025, per the press release — a precedent that Bermuda’s program now builds on.

This development marks a pivotal moment for the nascent sector’s relationship with sovereign financial infrastructure. A national government committing to move its payment economy on-chain is no longer a theoretical use case for blockchain technology — it is an operational one, and Stellar just became the network powering the world’s first attempt to prove it works at national scale.

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