SDF Outlines Stellar’s 2026 Strategy for Growth, Scale, and Readiness

• Stellar Development Foundation aims to increase network asset value by $1 billion by expanding asset utility across payments, treasury, and finance.
• At least 15 new enterprise partners, including global firms and NGOs, will onboard to Stellar, with 5 deploying live finance use cases in 2026.

The Stellar Development Foundation has published its 2026 strategy, setting objectives focused on network growth, operational scale, and technical readiness for broader financial use. In a post shared by the network’s official X account, SDF said it plans to “scale what already works, strengthen what’s proven, and invest where the network must be ready next,” while framing 2026 as a year to convert momentum into measurable results.

SDF’s plan is structured around four “north stars” that guide priorities for the network. These are open participation and governance, emphasis on the everyday financial services, a trusted technology stack, and performance-linked execution. The foundation presented these pillars as a way to keep development aligned with real-world payments and financial workflows.

In network activity, SDF projected a growth of total network asset value to $1 billion in 2026. This will stem from greater asset adoption, where business development, ecosystem growth, organic wallet growth, and greater liquidity in markets hit new heights.

In association with growth goals, SDF indicated continuing protocol development, with Protocol 25, the X-Ray upgrade, having already been rolled out on the mainnet. It also mentioned protocol building blocks that enable zero-knowledge applications on Soroban smart contracts, which it says will be introduced soon. 

Stellar Enterprise Adoption and Infrastructure Priorities

SDF also defined enterprise and institutional adoption objectives to shift engagement to production deployment. The foundation established year-end targets to sign 15 new transformational enterprises and implement at least five of them in 2026, citing large companies, international NGOs, and government agencies as examples of the target audience.

These deployments are expected to support payments, treasury, settlement, and other financial operations using the Stellar network. To support enterprise usage, SDF listed workstreams that include refining partner success processes, expanding institutional wallets and fiat on/off ramps, and adding exchange integrations. 

The strategy also includes “enterprise awareness” initiatives for organizations evaluating blockchain platforms for global financial use cases. In addition, SDF identified privacy as a priority area, describing plans to establish a compliant privacy infrastructure for confidential transfers and privacy-preserving workflows.

On the technology side, SDF said it will focus on increasing mainnet transactions per second, improving close times and end-to-end latency, and strengthening validator capacity to support high-volume applications such as card payments and global settlement. The foundation is streamlining protocol delivery, including emergency deployment readiness and regular shipping of production-ready protocol changes.

SDF tied its growth approach to ecosystem support programs as well, citing the Stellar Community Fund Growth Hack Cohort 1, which is designed to help teams building on the mainnet to improve go-to-market execution and reach product-market fit. On X, Stellar’s account summarized the direction as pairing “direction and acceleration.”

However, despite the unveiling of the 2026 strategy, the XLM price has seen a dip at press time, trading at $0.1635, a 7.50% decline.