Curve Takes StableSwap to Stellar, Its First Non-EVM Deployment

Curve Finance's StableSwap went live on Stellar's mainnet on Thursday, the first time the decentralized exchange has deployed natively outside the Ethereum virtual machine. The launch was announced with the Stellar Development Foundation. Anyone can open a pool, swap between assets and supply liquidity without seeking approval. A second Curve product, FXSwap, is planned for Stellar once its audit is finished, and no date has been attached to it. DeFiLlama put Curve's total value locked across all chains at about $1.27 billion when the announcement landed.

Pools anyone can open

StableSwap is the design Curve built in 2020 for assets meant to hold the same price. Its pricing curve flattens near the peg, so a trade between two dollar stablecoins moves the quoted rate far less than it would on an ordinary automated market maker. The same mechanism works for other closely correlated pairs. The Block's Thursday report sets out two uses past simple swapping: lending applications selling collateral during a liquidation or helping a borrower exit a position, and issuers building a venue for assets they have put on the network. Both wait on the pools attracting deposits and on other applications wiring into them.

Egorov says the pull is institutional

Michael Egorov, who founded Curve, put the move down to demand from institutions for cheaper settlement on chains built with compliance in mind.

"At Curve, we started exploring possibilities of launching beyond EVM chains if there is demand," Egorov said. "And at the same time, the demand for Curve is there, and it comes from institutions."

He told The Block that Stellar is closer to the familiar EVM world than many other chains, which he framed as a lower barrier for market makers and arbitrage desks. The network already carries Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund, whose shares a no-action letter cleared for ordinary funds in August, and MoneyGram uses it to settle transfers. Securitize added Stellar to its own tokenization platform on Wednesday, a day before Curve arrived.

How much is actually on the chain

The liquidity figures do not line up. TronWeekly, writing on Thursday, put Stellar's DeFi total value locked under $150 million and called it modest. DeFiLlama's own Stellar page, read on Friday, showed $198.5 million locked and almost no movement over 24 hours. The two do not reconcile, and neither account says which protocols it counts. Stablecoin supply is a separate question measured two ways: DeFiLlama gives a stablecoin market cap on Stellar of about $802 million, while TronWeekly cites Circle data for more than $650 million of USDC alone.

Wallet access widened the same day. MetaMask made Stellar a default network in its mobile app and browser extension, letting users hold XLM and Soroban tokens and swap between Stellar and other supported chains. Gal Eldar, its chief product officer, said users can transact on Stellar directly from that date. The mechanics are Stellar's own: a new address stays inactive until it holds at least 1 XLM, and each trustline, the standing permission an account gives to hold one particular asset, reserves another 0.5 XLM. TronWeekly described MetaMask as having more than 30 million monthly active users and cited no source for it; no other account read here carries the figure.

FXSwap is the bigger claim and it is not live

StableSwap handles assets pinned to one value. FXSwap is built for pairs whose prices move against each other, stablecoins pegged to different currencies among them, which is the foreign-exchange case and the part of Thursday's announcement with nothing behind it yet. The audit has to finish, and Curve has not said when that will be. Denelle Dixon, who runs the Stellar Development Foundation, said stablecoins and tokenized assets only deliver real value when people can move between them efficiently. That is the test the new pools face, once there is enough in them to measure.