Stellar TVL Surged to Nearly $200M, What's Behind It?

Stellar's (@StellarOrg) DeFi total value locked (TVL) crossed $200 million for the first time in late April 2026, with the on-chain figure printing $197.41 million on April 24 per DefiLlama, and briefly spiking above the milestone in the days that followed. The driver is not a hype cycle or token incentives. It is tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), specifically money market funds and tokenized US and European Treasury bills issued by Spiko, Ondo Finance, and Franklin Templeton.

The growth stands out because most Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains have lost liquidity through 2026. Stellar moved the other way, posting 284% year-over-year TVL growth through 2025 and carrying that momentum into Q1 and Q2.

How big was the surge?

Stellar's DeFi TVL sat under $12 million in November 2024. By May 2025, it had reached around $46 million. The first major leap came in January 2026, when it hit an earlier all-time high near $196 million. After a brief consolidation, the network printed a new peak just under $200 million on April 24, with intraday spikes pushing slightly above that mark in the days after.

Since then, TVL has cooled. As of May 27 2026, it sits at $161.12 million on DefiLlama, down from the April peak but still roughly seven times its level a year earlier. The stablecoin market cap on Stellar has also retraced, falling 23.15% over the past seven days to $323.73 million.

It is worth separating two figures that often get conflated. DefiLlama's chain TVL of around $200 million tracked native DeFi activity at the peak, like deposits in lending markets and DEX liquidity. The broader tokenized asset footprint on Stellar totals $2.4 billion across 65 issuances, per RWA.xyz, ranking the network #8 globally. Of that, $1.8 billion is in distributed (permissionless) assets across 41 issuances, putting Stellar at #4 behind only Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana. The remaining $579.7 million sits in represented (permissioned) assets across 24 issuances, where transfers are restricted. RWA inflows feed DeFi composability, which lifts on-chain TVL.

Which protocols pulled in the capital?

The bulk of Stellar's institutional RWA footprint comes from a handful of issuers.

Spiko is the dominant player. The French-regulated issuer of euro and dollar treasury bill tokens (EUTBL, USTBL, UKTBL) currently holds $563.1 million in distributed asset value on Stellar, out of $1.228 billion across seven chains. Stellar is Spiko's largest deployment, ahead of Arbitrum at $411.6 million and Polygon at $106.94 million.

Spiko's own TVL curve tells the story. Its total TVL rose from around $900 million in late 2025 to over $1.2 billion through early 2026, with the steepest climb starting in January, the same month Stellar's chain TVL hit its first all-time high of nearly $196 million.

Ondo Finance brings another $123 million to the network through its tokenized short-term US Treasury yield products. Franklin Templeton's BENJI tokenized money market fund is also live on Stellar, and WisdomTree adds roughly $24 million.

Messari's Q1 2026 report tracks the cumulative effect. Stellar's RWA market cap excluding stablecoins rose 91% quarter over quarter, from $796 million at the start of Q1 to $1.52 billion by quarter-end. It crossed $2 billion on April 11, driven mainly by tokenized government treasury assets.

Native DeFi has grown alongside the institutional flow. Blend, Stellar's main lending protocol, sits at around $110 million in TVL after a 25.9% quarter-over-quarter expansion through Q1. On the trading side, Aquarius Stellar reached $51.69 million and Stellar DEX hit $25.86 million, with seven-day DEX volume up 26.24% network-wide around the April peak.

What role did Soroban play?

Soroban is the technical unlock. Before its mainnet launch in 2024, Stellar could move tokenized assets but could not host lending markets, AMMs, or programmable yield products. That left RWA issuers using the network as a settlement rail without DeFi composability.

Soroban changed that by adding Rust-based smart contracts while keeping Stellar's existing strengths: fees under $0.00001 per transaction, fast finality, and a regulatory track record built on years of payments work with Circle, MoneyGram, and Franklin Templeton.

The result is an environment where regulated treasury products can settle, compose, and earn yield on the same chain. That is the design pitch institutions have wanted from a public blockchain for years.

Infrastructure providers have noticed. RedStone launched on Stellar mainnet in March 2026 with 10 live price feeds, including a BENJI feed for Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund. It cited Spiko's scale on the network as the reason for the deployment.

Where does Stellar stand now?

As of late May, the picture is mixed. TVL has retraced to $161 million; stablecoin supply on the network is down sharply this week; and XLM trades at $0.15, well below its levels earlier in the year. The disconnect between settlement demand and speculative price action continues to frustrate XLM holders.

The forward pipeline is the more interesting story. On May 27, DTCC and the Stellar Development Foundation announced plans to enable tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on the network, with the first assets expected in the first half of 2027. DTCC clears trillions of dollars in traditional securities annually, and the move plugs Stellar directly into the legacy settlement stack. Circle's CCTP went live on Stellar on May 19, connecting the network to the wallets, exchanges, and DeFi lending protocols that already use USDC. And Protocol 26 (Yardstick) shipped to mainnet on May 6, adding cryptographic host functions, integer arithmetic improvements, and the ability to freeze compromised ledger entries.

Spiko keeps shipping tokenized treasury products. Templar launched RWA lending on April 1 with Centrifuge and Etherfuse paper. Tokenization remains the cleanest growth narrative in crypto, and Stellar now ranks high in tokenized treasury activity alongside Ethereum and the major L2s.

The $200 million chain TVL milestone is small in absolute terms next to Ethereum or Solana. What matters more is the composition of that capital. Stellar's TVL is not farmed yield chasing emissions. It is institutional money parked in regulated products, which tends to stay sticky when broader markets crack.

Sources:

• DefiLlama - Stellar chain TVL, stablecoin mcap, and historical data
• DefiLlama - Spiko protocol TVL with chain-by-chain distributed asset value
• RWA.xyz - RWA league table covering distributed (permissionless) and represented (permissioned) tokenized asset value by chain
• Messari - State of Stellar Q1 2026 report covering RWA market cap growth and protocol-level metrics
• RedStone Blog - Oracle deployment announcement referencing Spiko TVL
• DTCC - Announcement of DTC-custodied asset tokenization on Stellar
• Stellar (@StellarOrg) - Protocol 26 mainnet launch, Circle CCTP, and DTCC partnership announcements