Curve Finance Launches StableSwap on Stellar Mainnet in First Non-EVM Deployment

Curve Finance has switched on its StableSwap exchange across the Stellar (XLM) mainnet, marking the automated market maker's first native deployment outside the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem since the protocol was founded in 2020. Automated market makers price trades from pooled liquidity rather than by matching individual buy and sell orders, which is why the rebuild described below required new contract code rather than a port.

A beta web interface at stellar.curve.finance is already operational. Users can create liquidity pools without permission, search existing pools, swap tokens, and supply liquidity. Curve and the Stellar Development Foundation disclosed the rollout in a joint announcement published on Thursday, October 29.

StableSwap, Curve's longest-serving pool design, is built for assets that should trade near the same price — two dollar-pegged stablecoins, wrapped Bitcoin, or synthetic instruments. The model applies a form of concentrated liquidity, pooling depth around the shared anchor rather than spreading it across a wide curve, which keeps slippage low and allows large orders to settle close to a one-to-one rate.

On Stellar, the design targets a specific market: the network's growing stock of regulated stablecoins and tokenized funds, which need a venue to trade against one another. Curve's statement stresses that pool creation is fully permissionless on the new deployment, and the team has told builders who want to launch ahead of interface support to reach out through Telegram or Discord.

Curve frames the rollout as on-chain liquidity infrastructure rather than a simple exchange listing. The Stellar version was completed with direct assistance from the Stellar Development Foundation, which initiated the invitation to deploy. The interface itself remains in beta, so coverage may still shift as the launch settles.

What makes the move notable is the barrier crossed: after six years of operating inside the EVM world, Curve now runs its exchange natively on a chain that does not use the Ethereum Virtual Machine at all — a step the team says it took only once real demand appeared.

Soroban Rebuild and Institutional Demand

Because Stellar does not run the EVM — the execution environment originally built for Ethereum that many other blockchains have since adopted for their own smart contracts — Curve's existing contracts, written in Vyper, a programming language designed for that environment, could not simply be copied over. The team rebuilt StableSwap from scratch on Soroban, Stellar's smart contract platform, working alongside the Stellar Development Foundation, and says the mathematics behind the pools have not changed.

Curve founder Michael Egorov wrote in the protocol's official blog post that the team has long evaluated bringing Curve to non-EVM chains whenever market demand justifies it, and he described Stellar as closer to the familiar EVM world than other non-EVM networks.

The demand in this case came from institutions, and it was the Stellar Development Foundation that approached Curve first, seeking to strengthen stablecoin markets on its network. Stellar has been in the payments business since 2014, and its ecosystem already carries Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund along with MoneyGram's cross-border remittance service. Assets issued on the network can be configured with issuer controls such as identity verification, forced redemption, and sanctions compliance — a feature set built for regulated issuers.

Market data puts Curve's total value locked — the combined value of assets deposited across its pools — at about $1.27 billion, meaning the protocol is adding a chain from a position of scale rather than experimentation.

Uses Beyond Spot Swaps

Curve also points to applications beyond spot swaps. Lending protocols on Stellar can sell seized collateral through Curve pools during liquidations — the forced sales triggered when a borrowing position no longer meets its collateral requirement — and borrowers can close positions in the same pools. A deep pool also makes an issuer's asset easier for holders to exit and more likely to be accepted as collateral by lending protocols.

The next module is FXSwap, Curve's pool for assets whose prices move against each other, such as a dollar stablecoin against a euro stablecoin. It concentrates liquidity at the current market price instead of a fixed peg, effectively building dedicated infrastructure for on-chain foreign exchange. Curve says development is nearly complete and an audit comes next, with no timetable given.

Cross-Currency Swaps Await Audit

The significance sits in the pairing rather than the port: a payment chain built around issuer compliance has connected a mature DeFi liquidity layer for the first time, and Curve has named Stellar its only non-EVM focus for the foreseeable future. On-chain deposits and swap volume in the Stellar pools — set against a baseline that saw the network process 14.16 million transactions on October 23 — will show whether the bet holds.

The FXSwap audit decides more, because cross-currency settlement is Stellar's core business. Once a dollar and a euro stablecoin can be exchanged compliantly in production, the network's case with TradFi institutions and cross-border PayFi corridors strengthens, building on Securitize naming Stellar its 17th blockchain for tokenized assets and Janus Henderson's Nasdaq-100 fund JQQQ topping $1 billion.

Until that audit clears, Curve's presence on Stellar rests on same-peg pools alone.