StellarGuard will be adding a throttle feature and an auto-approval mode, allowing users to place caps on how much an asset can be traded per day from their account and allowing users to have transactions signed without user interaction. “Perfect for securing your trading bots!”

SDF details “Stellar Protocol Values” to help guide people as they are submitting protocol changes (CAPs). Highlights:

• “Stellar network should facilitate side-chain transactions to enable sub-networks.”
• “The Stellar network should support decentralization wherever possible, but not at the expense of the majority of its values.”
• “We should not over complicate the protocol itself, and the more outside of the core protocol, the better.”
• Heavy emphasis on filtering changes through the goal of cross-border payments.

With funding from the likes of SXSW and the Catalyst Fund, Leaf Global Fintech provides mobile financial services to refugees, helping them arrive in new countries with more money. "Early development of Leaf’s platform utilizes Stellar’s DLT."

CoinDesk profiles Jed McCaleb. Highlights:

• Interstellar is "trying to make the first killer app" - "a viable business built on Stellar"
• “People put the time frame wrong as dot-com, when actually it’s just way before like Arpanet kind of stuff”
• "He sees the next step in its evolution as enlisting more people to build the wallets and exchanges needed for it to truly become what it was meant to be: a useful, open-source protocol for payments."
• Stripe "need(s) the ecosystem to be a certain level of maturity, they need the anchor, the person issuing the fiat currency on the network. We need those entities to exist before they can use the network.”
• On IBM, he says: “They’re building a thing, WorldWire, that is a replacement for SWIFT, and it’s built on Stellar. We just talk to their engineers and help them through the process.”

Yahoo Finance interviews McCaleb. Highlights:

• "If it’s not a public chain, then you’re missing the point."
• "In the rest of the cryptocurrency world now, there’s this big push for tokenizing different things, and now there’s the stablecoin hype, and Stellar has sort of been doing this all along, we just weren’t calling it that."

Stronghold airdropped 100,000 SHX tokens to all of their verified customers - token utility to be announced.

SDF details updates to their approach to developer engagement, including a new developer mailing list for transparency and collaboration, wallet guidelines for security and interoperability, a new Stellar Developer Program for ongoing support project beyond the Stellar Build Challenge, and an evolved Stellar Build Challenge modeled more closely after hackathon events.

OrbitLens of StellarExpert details how he discovered a vulnerability in the Stellar DEX that allowed an attacker to buy small amounts of an asset at a 1:1 rate, and how validators in the network moved quickly to update Stellar Core to eliminate this bug.

Token's USD anchored asset is now paired with tokens like XLM, ETH, XRP, and BTC on the DEX and listed as a new market on Stellarport (see the USD "Markets" tab).

BlockEQ is moving its Android wallet app out of beta with DEX access, token management and trustline issuance, and exchange address recognition.

SDF describes updates to their lumen distribution programs, including more details on the Stellar Community Fund, revisions to the Partnership Grant Program, and a new academic research program to fund proposals that advance financial inclusion.

"The Stellar Development Foundation is soliciting proposals for basic technical, economic, and legal research advancing the foundation’s goals of financial inclusion, fast and inexpensive cross-border payments, efficient decentralized markets, and other beneficial applications of distributed ledger technology."

Swych - a mobile gifting app for sending digital gift cards across borders - is now powering cross-border gifting using the Stellar network.

Leaders from Flutterwave and SureRemit - two Stellar-based companies - spoke at TechCrunch’s Battlefield Africa event in Nigeria.

FactR - a freight and fleet management tool that powers cross-border transactions using Stellar - is now listed on the IBM Marketplace.

Stellar Core v10.1.0 was released, improving performance by changing the way stellar-core interfaces with the database.

White-label cryptocurrency exchange AlphaPoint now supports lumens. AlphaPoint powers 100 exchanges, 10 of which have already listed lumens.

Lightyear.io (Interstellar) investor Ali Hamed (CoVenture) appeared on Pomp’s Off the Chain podcast and briefly discussed the concept of a global currency and Stellar.

Paul Selden of StellarGuard breaks down the scam tactics of the Stellar Activity "hard fork" and how they steal secret seeds.‬

SDF lays out their updated community plans, including local gatherings of Stellar users called "Clusters", a Stellar global conference, r/Stellar subreddit governance via polls and points, a way for the community to participate in lumen awards called the Stellar Community Fund, and a hint at a new Stellar.org website coming in 2019.

Pigzbe launched a Kickstarter for their hardware wallet.

Coinsquare - a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange - acquired Stellar wallet BlockEQ. BlockEQ will remain a separate entity and will work with Coinsquare to launch Coinsquare’s upcoming stable coin.‬

BitGo - a multsig and custodial wallet provider - officially announced support for lumens as well as federated addresses.

Recent proposals involving the use of data entries have inspired debate over whether data entries should be used or deprecated.