Stellar Development Foundation

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a nonprofit, founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, that supports the Stellar network and invests in companies building financial services on it. Its stated mandate is to create more equitable access to the global financial system through blockchain technology; the organisation builds and sustains the underlying open-source infrastructure while funding the ecosystem around it. Beyond direct investment, SDF supports the network's participants through grants, funding programmes, developer resources and strategic partnerships.

The Stellar network is an open-source, decentralised blockchain designed for fast, low-cost and energy-efficient transactions, with an emphasis on cross-border payments, remittances and the tokenisation of real-world assets. Soroban, the network's native smart contracts platform, extends that scope to payments, asset tokenisation and decentralised finance (DeFi). The technical domains in play for portfolio companies therefore include blockchain infrastructure, payments technology, smart contracts, asset tokenisation and DeFi.

SDF operates across financial services, payments and remittances, decentralised finance, asset tokenisation, the nonprofit and NGO sector, and government. Its presence is described as global. Candidates should note the organisational form: SDF is a mission-driven nonprofit with a stated commitment to open-source software, rather than a conventional commercial operator, which shapes both how it allocates capital and how it works with the companies and developers in its ecosystem.