On this page
- The early era: IBM, World Wire and the bank pitch
- Circle and the stablecoin wave
- MoneyGram: from pilot to its own stablecoin
- UNHCR and Stellar Aid Assist
- Wall Street on Stellar: Franklin Templeton, CME and regulators
- Card payments and merchants: Wirex, Visa and AEON Pay
- The latest wave: MetaMask, Marketnode and Asia
- Measuring Stellar adoption beyond the headlines
- Stellar rumours that don’t hold up
- How to verify a Stellar partnership claim yourself
Stellar’s adoption rests on a small number of large, well-documented partnerships rather than a long list of logos. The verified core is MoneyGram for cash remittances, Circle for USDC, Franklin Templeton for tokenised funds, PayPal and Paxos for PYUSD, Wirex for Visa card settlement and, most recently, MetaMask, which made Stellar a default network in October 2026. Each of these is confirmed by a primary press release, and most of them involve stablecoins moving on the Stellar network rather than companies buying XLM.
This page sorts the real Stellar Lumens partnerships from the noise. We walk through the deals in order, explain what each one actually does, flag the rumours that keep circulating, and show you how to check any new claim yourself. It is written to stay useful, so it is not a dated news feed: for fresh announcements, the Stellar Development Foundation’s press page at stellar.org/press is the official source.
- Most major Stellar partnerships use stablecoins on Stellar, with XLM paying only fees and reserves.
- MoneyGram, Circle, Franklin Templeton, PayPal/Paxos, Wirex and MetaMask are confirmed by primary releases.
- Institutional access grew in 2026: CME XLM futures in February, and an SEC/CFTC release naming XLM as an example of a digital commodity in March.
- In Asia the verified ties are in Singapore, the Philippines and Southeast Asian payments, not in Japan, Korea, Vietnam or Indonesia.
The early era: IBM, World Wire and the bank pitch
Stellar launched in July 2014 as a non-profit-led payments network, and its first big corporate name was IBM. In October 2017 IBM and KlickEx partnered on Stellar-based cross-border payments in the South Pacific. In March 2019 IBM unveiled Blockchain World Wire, a real-time payments network for regulated financial institutions built on Stellar. It launched in “limited production”, with XLM and Stronghold USD as its first live assets, and at launch IBM said it covered 72 countries and 47 currencies.
What happened next matters as much as the launch. The IBM executive who led the project, Jesse Lund, left the company in May 2019. We found no official IBM notice shutting World Wire down, but we also found no sign that it is operating today. The honest description is “a 2019 IBM network on Stellar whose current status is unconfirmed”, and anyone who calls it a live IBM–Stellar payment rail is repeating an old headline.
The same year brought the first Meridian, SDF’s annual conference, held in Mexico City in November 2019. Meridian has since moved around the world: virtual in 2020, Rome in 2022, Madrid in 2023, London in 2024, Rio de Janeiro in 2025 and Lisbon in October 2026. Many of Stellar’s partnership announcements are timed to it, which is useful to know when you see a burst of news at the end of a year.
Circle and the stablecoin wave
The deal that shaped modern Stellar adoption is USDC going live on Stellar on 2 February 2021. Circle’s dollar stablecoin gave every Stellar app a trusted dollar to move, and at our latest check roughly 300 million USDC circulated on the network. Circle added EURC, its euro coin, in September 2023 at Meridian Madrid.
Others followed. PayPal’s PYUSD went live on Stellar on 18 September 2025, issued by Paxos and built on the Stellar Asset Contract so it works with Soroban smart contracts. Keep the scale in perspective: PYUSD supply on Stellar was around $18 million at our latest check, a fraction of USDC’s. Visa added Stellar to the networks it uses for stablecoin settlement in mid-2025, and Société Générale-FORGE brought its EURCV euro coin in February 2025. Our guide to stablecoins on Stellar covers each token and how to spot fakes.
MoneyGram: from pilot to its own stablecoin
MoneyGram is Stellar’s longest-running payments partner. The company announced its SDF partnership on 6 October 2021, covering USDC settlement and cash access for Stellar wallets. A US pilot followed, and in June 2022 MoneyGram launched USDC cash-in and cash-out through Stellar anchors and fiat ramps, with the US, Canada, Kenya and the Philippines as the first named markets.
The numbers are worth reading carefully. In its three-year review, SDF said the service was present in “over 170 countries” and had handled “nearly $30 million” in total volume. That is meaningful but modest next to MoneyGram’s core business, and it is why figures like “500,000 Stellar cash-out points” mislead: roughly 500,000 is MoneyGram’s entire retail network, not a Stellar-specific count.
The relationship deepened in 2025 and 2026. MoneyGram launched an app with a USDC balance on Stellar in Colombia in September 2025, later extending it to El Salvador. On 2 June 2026 it launched MGUSD, its own stablecoin on Stellar, issued by Bridge. MoneyGram also runs validators: at our latest check, the Obsrvr Radar network crawler listed it among the ten organisations in Stellar’s top tier, alongside Franklin Templeton and SDF.
UNHCR and Stellar Aid Assist
Stellar’s best-known humanitarian deployment began in December 2022, when UNHCR started sending USDC to people displaced by the war in Ukraine. Recipients held the funds in the Vibrant wallet, now operating as Vesseo, and could cash out at MoneyGram locations. The pilot started in Kyiv, Lviv and Vinnytsia.
SDF’s one-year update reported that the programme reached “over 1,500 individuals” and disbursed “more than $1.1 million”. Early reports mentioned a plan for up to 5,000 wallets by April 2023, but that was a target, not a result. The tooling behind it became the open-source Stellar Disbursement Platform in August 2023, which has also been used for payments in Gambia and Mexico.
Wall Street on Stellar: Franklin Templeton, CME and regulators
In 2021 Franklin Templeton launched its OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) on Stellar, the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain to process transactions and record share ownership. Each BENJI token represents one fund share. Franklin’s five-year release put the fund on Stellar above $650 million in April 2026. The product also reached Asia: Singapore’s sgBENJI is a MAS-authorised retail fund distributed through platforms including ADDX and DBS. Our tokenisation guide covers the wider real-world asset market on Stellar.
Market infrastructure followed in 2026. CME Group launched Stellar (XLM) futures on 9 February 2026, giving institutions a regulated way to hedge or gain exposure. On 17 March 2026 the SEC and CFTC published interpretive release 33-11412, which lists Stellar (XLM) among its examples of digital commodities. That is guidance, not a court ruling or a statute, and the SEC said it may revise it. Our page on XLM regulation and safety explains what it does and does not change.
Card payments and merchants: Wirex, Visa and AEON Pay
The most tangible consumer partnership of 2025 came from Wirex. On 18 November 2025 Wirex and SDF went live with Visa settlement in USDC and EURC on Stellar. Cardholders tap a normal Visa card; behind the scenes the settlement leg runs in stablecoins on Stellar. Wirex cites 7 million users, which is its own figure.
So who accepts Stellar Lumens? Fewer merchants than social media suggests. The clearest named example is AEON Pay, a Southeast Asian QR payments network that announced acceptance of XLM and Stellar USDC in April 2025. Its “20 million QR stores” figure describes AEON Pay’s whole network, not shops taking XLM. In practice, Stellar reaches shops through cards and payment apps that merchants already use, and the money moving is usually a stablecoin.
The latest wave: MetaMask, Marketnode and Asia
Late 2026 brought one of the largest distribution deals Stellar has had. On 29 October 2026, around Meridian in Lisbon, SDF announced that MetaMask had made Stellar a default network in its mobile app and extension, giving existing users a Stellar address from their current recovery phrase. The same week brought announcements from Curve, Securitize, Taurus and WalletConnect, most of them integrations or plans rather than finished products.
For Asia, the headline is SDF’s strategic investment in Marketnode, a Singapore market-infrastructure company backed by Euroclear, HSBC, SGX Group and Temasek. Terms were not disclosed. In August 2026 Marketnode had said it would bring select BNY Investments funds onchain via Stellar for Asia-Pacific institutional investors. Earlier Asian links include the TopNod wallet, announced at Consensus Hong Kong in February 2026; Thai remittance firm Lightnet, which raised a UOB-led $31.2 million Series A in 2020 as a Stellar-based company (its current Stellar use is unconfirmed); and Coins.ph in the Philippines, a launch partner for Mastercard’s Crypto Credential on Stellar. Our Asia hub has country-by-country detail.
Measuring Stellar adoption beyond the headlines
Partnership announcements are only half the picture. The other half is whether people and institutions actually use the network, and a few public numbers help here. In its 2025 year in review, SDF reported more than 10 million active accounts, over 800 active projects and real-world assets on Stellar up 172% year on year. Those are SDF’s own figures, so read them as the foundation’s scorecard rather than an audit.
Independent trackers point the same way. At our latest check, data aggregators put stablecoins on Stellar at roughly $340–370 million, depending on which tokens they count, and tokenised real-world assets at several billion dollars, led by money market funds from Spiko and Franklin Templeton. DeFi activity is smaller, in the low hundreds of millions of dollars locked.
The pattern is consistent: Stellar’s adoption is strongest where regulated institutions need cheap, fast settlement for dollars and fund shares, and weaker in speculative DeFi. That is exactly what the partner list above would predict. It also explains why cross-border payments and tokenised funds dominate Stellar’s news flow, and why a new partnership rarely means new demand for XLM itself.
Stellar rumours that don’t hold up
Partnership rumours spread faster than press releases. These are the ones we see most often, checked against primary sources.
| Claim | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| MoneyGram uses XLM as a bridge | It uses USDC and its own MGUSD |
| 500,000 Stellar cash-out points | That is MoneyGram’s whole network |
| Aid Assist helped millions | 1,500+ people in year one |
| IBM World Wire is live | Status unconfirmed since 2019 |
| 20M shops accept XLM via AEON | AEON’s reach, not XLM acceptance |
| The SEC ruled XLM not a security | Guidance listing XLM as an example |
| Google Cloud, Telegram are partners | No official partnership found |
| Meridian 2026 was in Abu Dhabi | It was held in Lisbon |
| SDF deals in Japan, Korea, Vietnam | None found |
Visa deserves a note of its own. Visa did add Stellar to its stablecoin settlement networks, and Wirex settles Visa card spend on Stellar. That is not the same as Visa partnering with Stellar on everything, or Visa cards spending XLM directly. SDF has said it plans anchor networks in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, but plans are not partnerships.
How to verify a Stellar partnership claim yourself
You don’t need insider access to check a headline. Five minutes and a few primary sources will do.
- Find both press releasesA real partnership is usually announced by SDF at stellar.org/press and by the partner on its own newsroom. A tweet, a video or a “sources say” article is not confirmation.
- Read the exact verb”Exploring”, “announced”, “will integrate”, “invested in” and “live” are different stages. Many headline deals stay at the announcement stage for months.
- Check what moves on the networkAsk whether the deal uses XLM or a stablecoin. Most payment partnerships move USDC or similar tokens, which matters if you are thinking about the XLM price.
- Confirm it on-chainIf a company issues an asset, look up its issuer account and home domain in a Stellar explorer. Copycat tokens with the same names exist, so the issuer is what counts.
- Separate reach from usageFigures like “170 countries” or “20 million merchants” often describe a partner’s whole business. Look for numbers that describe the Stellar product itself.
Partnerships are the best evidence of real use, but they are not a price signal on their own. Before you act on any announcement, read our XLM price prediction page for the factors that move the market, and keep the difference between a live product and a press release firmly in mind.
Frequently asked questions
Who are Stellar's biggest partners?
The most significant verified names are MoneyGram, Circle (USDC and EURC), Franklin Templeton, PayPal and Paxos (PYUSD), Wirex with Visa settlement, and MetaMask, which made Stellar a default network in October 2026. Each one is backed by a primary press release from the company or the Stellar Development Foundation.
Who accepts Stellar Lumens as payment?
Direct XLM acceptance by shops is rare. Southeast Asian payments network AEON Pay announced acceptance of XLM and Stellar USDC in April 2025, but most real-world Stellar spending happens through stablecoins behind apps and cards. See our guide to Stellar apps.
Is IBM still working with Stellar?
IBM launched World Wire, a Stellar-based payments network for regulated institutions, in March 2019. We found no official shutdown notice, but also no evidence that it is active today, so it should not be described as a live network.
Do partnerships make the XLM price go up?
Not reliably. Many big partners use stablecoins such as USDC on Stellar and only need small amounts of XLM for fees and reserves. Read our XLM price prediction page for the factors that do move the market.
Where can I follow Stellar news without the hype?
The Stellar Development Foundation publishes official announcements on its press page at stellar.org/press, and partner companies post their own releases. Check both sides of a deal before treating it as confirmed.
