Stellar Partners with Space and Time for Data-Driven Smart Contracts, Announces X Ray Privacy Upgrade

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has announced a strategic integration with decentralized data platform Space and Time to power data-driven smart contracts on the Stellar network. This partnership brings indexed blockchain data into Stellar, allowing developers to build financial tools that rely on verified on-chain and external data sources. The integration aims to strengthen projects involved in payments, asset issuance, and other on-chain activities by providing a unified and reliable method to supply trusted information.

Space and Time now gathers Stellar data and stores it in a verified, update-ready format, enabling users to inspect wallet behavior, token activity, and build data-supported programs with lower cost and faster development. The system also grants smart contracts access to large datasets from other chains and trusted off-chain sources. Tomer Weller, Chief Product Officer at SDF, stated: "Space and Time's indexing solution brings a new level of verifiability and accessibility to data on Stellar. This integration bridges information in a way that can strengthen trust and enable developers to design more advanced, data-driven smart contracts and applications."

Concurrently, Stellar has announced its upcoming Protocol 25 upgrade, known as Stellar X Ray, scheduled for a testnet vote on January 7, 2026, and a mainnet vote on January 22, 2026. This upgrade introduces zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography features directly into the network, consisting of two main components: the BN254 elliptic curve for verifying zk-SNARK proofs and the Poseidon hash function family to lower costs and improve performance for privacy-preserving applications. These features will enable confidential transfers and selective disclosure tools while maintaining network auditability.

In related developments, Stellar CEO Denelle Dixon commented on the broader blockchain adoption trend, emphasizing that "the real opportunity isn't replicating old systems on new rails—it's building open networks that fundamentally expand who gets to participate in global finance." This statement came in reaction to Wall Street institutions like BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital participating in a $50 million investment round for Digital Asset Holdings.

Stellar's native token, XLM, was trading at $0.23 at the time of reporting, showing a 3.72% decline over the past day. Despite this, technical analyst Ali Martinez suggests the price could potentially rebound to $0.34 based on historical patterns.