Q3 saw continued growth in Stellar’s presence within the real-world asset space, as RWA market cap climbed 14% QoQ to $562 million.
Stellar is a public, open-source blockchain protocol launched in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim under the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). In its Q3 2025 report, the Stellar Foundation highlighted the network’s continued momentum in real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.
Designed from the ground up for asset issuance, the Stellar platform natively supports tokenized representations of money market funds, bonds, equities, and commodities, carrying a clear message of being “built for asset tokenization.”
The network handled more than 1 billion operations this quarter, a roughly 70% increase quarter-over-quarter, while maintaining an uptime of 99.99% and an average ledger close time of 5.76 seconds. Transaction fees remained extremely low at around $0.00055 per operation.
This has kept Stellar among the most cost-efficient blockchains, ranking it as the 15th-largest token with a market capitalization of around $8.8 billion.
Stellar’s appeal lies in its low-cost, high-speed infrastructure that delivers both scalability and accessibility. With this in mind, Stellar naturally lends itself to global RWA use cases.
In Q3, RWA’s market capitalization on Stellar reached $562 million, up 14% quarter-over-quarter, while total supply expanded 20%. Meanwhile, cross-border RWA payments hit an all-time high of $5.4 billion, a 27% QoQ increase. Earlier in the year, Stellar recorded $3.4 billion in RWA payment volume during Q1 alone.
This growth is being driven by institutional participation and real-world integrations. According to reports by Crypto News Flash, Mercado Bitcoin announced a $200 million RWA issuance on Stellar, with assets expected to go live between this month and December.
On top of this, Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) is a regulated U.S. mutual fund that bridges traditional finance and blockchain by issuing each share as a BENJI token recorded on the Stellar blockchain. Issuers like WisdomTree, Ondo, and Centrifuge have continued to expand the network’s institutional footprint.
Earlier this year, Visa integrated Stellar into its stablecoin settlement platform. This means Visa can now settle transactions using stablecoins, including those on Stellar. The yield-bearing stable-coin USDY from Ondo Finance, launched on Stellar, is backed by short-term US Treasuries, combining stable-coin functionality with DeFi yield.
The network’s Total Value Locked (TVL) currently stands at $144.42 million, reflecting a 71% year-over-year increase and a 3.6× expansion in overall DeFi activity, despite an 8.24% dip over the last 24 hours. The stablecoin market cap on Stellar has reached $257.45 million, up 4.64% over the past week, with USDC maintaining dominance at 95.63%,
Beyond DeFi and stablecoins, Stellar’s infrastructure continues to enable real-world applications. Through the Stellar Disbursement Platform, partners such as GIZ, UNDP, and the World Food Programme have processed $4.2 million year-to-date, marking a 50% quarter-over-quarter increase.
They also revealed on X that,
The Stellar Ambassador program also continued to scale throughout the quarter, with 400 new signups, 160 community events, and double-digit regional growth across Latin America and Asia Pacific.
As reported by CNF, the Whisk upgrade went live in September. Whisk introduced parallel execution, a tool that enables multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously rather than sequentially. This is considered a crucial enhancement for throughput and network efficiency.
Alongside this, faster block times and unified token events to streamline on-chain operations were introduced. For developers, this means more responsive, data-rich applications while maintaining Stellar’s hallmark speed and reliability.
Building on this, Stellar’s validators approved the Protocol 24 Mainnet upgrade on October 22. This upgrade was essential for participants running core infrastructure components, including Stellar Core, Horizon, RPC, and Galexie, ensuring system compatibility and improving network performance.
Protocol 25 is set to advance Stellar’s capabilities further, introducing zk-ready cryptography to enable privacy-enhanced, compliance-focused applications. Meanwhile, XLM is trading at $0.27, down 8.85% over the past seven days.
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