Stellar Rides 200% RWA Surge After Winning Over U.S. Bank and Others

If the main crypto narratives to watch in 2026 are winning over developers and asset issuers, Stellar seems to be right where it wants to be.

In a new interview with Coinage for Crypto Project of the Year, Stellar's Chief Product Officer explained why the blockchain that has been around longer than Ethereum still boasts one of the fastest growing developer communities in crypto — and how that led to the total market cap of real-world assets on Stellar surging about 200% over the last year.

“2025 really marked this transitional year of like, moving from 0 to 1 of proving that there’s something here to actually scaling it up,” said Tomer Weller said.

Rather than chasing speculative cycles, Stellar spent years building core financial infrastructure: payment rails, regulated on- and off-ramps, and relationships with institutions that operate inside existing compliance frameworks. That long-term focus is now paying dividends, as the network increasingly appears in places where crypto adoption has long been expected to matter most, including banks, remittance networks, and regulated financial firms.

U.S. Bank recently announced it's testing custom stablecoin issuance on Stellar’s network and payments have always been central to Stellar’s design. Even before stablecoins became a core focus of regulatory debates in Washington, the network was built specifically to move value across borders quickly and at low cost.

“Payments, which are the bread and butter of the stellar network, are also seeing growth,” Weller said. “We’re seeing more active payment users on the network than ever before.”

A key driver of that growth has been Stellar’s anchor system, which connects blockchain-based assets to the traditional financial world through regulated intermediaries. Partnerships like MoneyGram allow users to convert onchain USDC into local fiat currency at scale.

According to Weller, U.S. Bank’s work on Stellar is the result of years of prioritizing reliability and regulatory alignment over rapid experimentation. He described the effort not as an isolated partnership, but as part of a broader trend among traditional financial institutions.

“This is just one example of a traditional financial institution that is coming to blockchain because of this explosion of both a favorable regulatory environment, but also technology that has repeatedly proven itself,” Weller said.

In that sense, banks are not arriving because crypto has become louder or more speculative, but because the underlying technology has matured enough to support real-world use.

One of Stellar’s most consistent design principles has been to make blockchain largely invisible to end users. Weller argues that this abstraction is essential if the technology is to move beyond pilots and into production systems.

“We’ve always taken the approach that blockchain is this infrastructure layer in the background,” he said. “The best user experience is that you have no idea that there is a blockchain happening behind the scenes.”

As a result, applications built on Stellar increasingly resemble traditional financial apps rather than crypto-native tools. And beyond payments, Stellar has also seen significant growth in tokenized real-world assets, another area attracting institutional interest.

“RWA grew by almost 200%,” Weller said. “More than $580 million worth of tokens.”

Asset managers and financial firms including Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and PayPal have launched products on the network, signaling that capital is being deployed rather than merely tested. At the same time, Stellar’s smart contract platform, Soroban, has helped more than double DeFi activity on the network, creating what Weller described as a convergence of payments, tokenized assets, and yield within a framework institutions can operate in.

Looking ahead, Weller believes the current wave of experimentation is an early signal of deeper structural change.

“We’ve always been really focused on this idea of creating equitable access to the world’s financial system,” Weller said. “And we didn’t give up to hype cycles — and it’s really paying off right now.”

Stellar is a featured contender in Coinage's Crypto Project of the Year celebration. Vote to crown the best project in crypto today!