Best DeFi Platforms on Stellar (2026): 10 Compared by Use Case

Stellar DeFi platforms at a glance

Platform	Type	Best for	Key mechanic
Blend	Lending	Supplying or borrowing XLM and USDC	Isolated pools, each with a first-loss backstop
Stellar DeFi Hub	Curated vaults	Passive XLM, USDC or PYUSD yield	Sentora-curated strategies
Aquarius	AMM + incentives	Swaps and earning AQUA as an LP	ICE votes direct AQUA emissions to pools
Upshift (Gami)	Curated vault	USDC yield with a professional curator	Curator allocates across Blend and Aquarius
DeFindex	Vault infrastructure	Yield inside wallets and apps	Vaults that wallets integrate by API
Sushi	Concentrated-liquidity DEX	Stablecoin and RWA token pairs	Sushi V3 ranges
Templar	Lending	Borrowing USDC against XLM or RWAs	NEAR chain signatures
Soroswap	AMM + aggregator	Routed swaps across Soroban AMMs	Fixed 0.30% pools, adapter-based router
XOXNO Lending	Lending	Borrowing against Aquarius LP tokens	LP collateral at 50% LTV
Reflector	Oracle	Not a deposit venue: prices for others	Node quorum, 5-minute SEP-40 feeds

Stellar DeFi by the numbers (October 2026)

DefiLlama put Stellar DeFi at $271.6M on 6 October 2026, 19th among all chains, with a record daily close of $272.8M on 1 October. That is up from $155.6M on 1 January. The ten platforms here are ordered by their Stellar TVL on the same day:

Platform	Stellar TVL, 6 Oct 2026	Note
Blend (V2 pools)	$162.8M	$43.8M borrowed
Stellar DeFi Hub	$57.5M	Vault; deposits sit in other protocols
Aquarius	$39.5M	$98.1M swap volume in 30 days
Upshift (Gami Labs curator)	$29.4M	Vault
DeFindex	$19.4M	Vault, almost all USDC
Sushi	$15.2M	Listed on DefiLlama since May 2026
Templar	$13.3M	Lending
Soroswap	$1.2M	Down from $9.8M in July 2025
XOXNO Lending	$0.13M	Live on Stellar since September 2026
Reflector	n/a	Oracle, holds no deposits

Two cautions. First, the vaults are not additive: the protocol figures only reconcile with the chain total if Stellar DeFi Hub, Upshift and DeFindex are left out, because their money is already counted inside Blend, Aquarius and others. Second, the protocol's own order book (the Stellar DEX, $17.7M) and its classic AMM pools ($14.1M) are counted too; we cover them in the best DEX on Stellar. For the trend behind these numbers, see Stellar DeFi TVL in 2026.

How to choose

• You want interest on XLM or USDC and will manage it yourself: Blend, after reading how each pool prices its collateral.
• You want someone else to manage it: a curated vault (Stellar DeFi Hub, Upshift) or a wallet that embeds DeFindex. You add a curator and another contract to the risk stack.
• You want to trade: Aquarius has nearly all the tracked volume; an aggregator such as Soroswap's can split a trade across venues.
• You want to provide liquidity: Aquarius if you want AQUA rewards on top of fees; Sushi for concentrated ranges on stablecoin and RWA pairs.
• You want to borrow against something unusual: Templar for tokenised credit and Treasuries, XOXNO for Aquarius LP tokens.

Blend — the lending base layer

Blend is Stellar's dominant lending protocol: a set of isolated pools in which lenders supply assets, borrowers post collateral, and each pool has a backstop of BLND:USDC LP tokens that takes first loss on bad debt. It held about $162.8M on 6 October 2026 per DefiLlama, with $43.8M borrowed.

Anyone can deploy a Blend pool and choose its assets, collateral factors and oracle, so "Blend" is really a family of markets of very different quality. Blend's documentation describes backstop depositors as "first-loss capital": if a pool incurs bad debt, their deposits are auctioned to cover it. DefiLlama recorded about $327K of fees over the past 30 days.

The composition matters more than the headline: about $151M of the $162.8M was XLM (699M XLM), and only $11.5M was USDC. Blend's dollar TVL therefore tracks the XLM price closely. The two 2026 incidents, the YieldBlox oracle manipulation and the Comet backstop exploit, are covered in Blend's 2026 incidents; the mechanics are in what is Blend.

Stellar DeFi Hub — Sentora's curated vaults

Stellar DeFi Hub is a vault front-end built by Ultra Stellar that carries vaults curated by Sentora, an institutional DeFi manager. It launched in July 2026 with an XLM vault, followed by USDC and PYUSD, and has grown fastest of the platforms on this list: from $13.9M on 22 August to $57.5M on 6 October.

Sentora announced the vaults with the Stellar Development Foundation and said strategies across Blend, Templar and Aquarius would follow. On 6 October DefiLlama showed the hub holding about 37.1M USDC, 75.5M XLM and 4.1M PYUSD. As a curated product, its returns and risks depend on where the curator places funds at any given time, so read the vault's current allocation rather than its launch description. DefiLlama lists no audits for it.

Aquarius — the liquidity layer

Aquarius runs Stellar's main AMM as Soroban contracts, with volatile, stable and concentrated-liquidity pools, and pays AQUA emissions to pools that ICE holders vote for. It held $39.5M on 6 October 2026 and handled $98.1M of swaps in the previous 30 days, essentially all of the Stellar DEX volume DefiLlama tracks.

Aquarius's docs say 7 million AQUA a day are allocated to SDEX and AMM rewards, with any single market capped at 10%, and that since June 2026 emissions only reach markets whose assets are whitelisted in its Asset Registry. Liquidity providers holding ICE can boost their AQUA rewards by up to 2.5×. The concentrated pools are newer: the docs call that surface beta, with contracts under external audit. The mechanics are explained in the Aquarius AMM explained and ICE voting and bribes.

WhaleHub, which publishes this article, builds on this layer: it stakes AQUA, aggregates ICE voting power and auto-compounds Aquarius rewards. DefiLlama listed it at about $17K on 6 October, too small for this list.

Upshift (Gami Labs) — a curated USDC vault

Upshift is a multichain vault platform that came to Stellar in June 2026, its first non-EVM deployment. Its main Stellar product is Gami Labs' earnUSDC vault, which takes USDC and lets the curator allocate it across protocols such as Blend and Aquarius. DefiLlama showed $29.4M on 6 October 2026.

Upshift says its Stellar vault is a Soroban contract built on OpenZeppelin's Stellar token library and audited by Halborn, and that withdrawals are instant up to the USDC held on hand, with larger amounts returned as the curator unwinds positions. That second point is the one to remember: in a stressed market, a curated vault can only pay out as fast as its underlying positions can be exited. Lumen Loop reports Fordefi providing MPC custody and Hypernative risk monitoring.

DeFindex — yield for wallets

DeFindex, built by PaltaLabs, is vault infrastructure that wallets and fintech apps integrate so their users can earn on stablecoins without leaving the app. It held $19.4M on 6 October 2026, almost all of it USDC, with Blend among its strategies.

DeFindex lists Beans, Seevcash, Soroswap, xPortal, Hana Wallet and Meru among its integrations and cites an OtterSec audit from March 2025. Several Stellar Community Fund #45 awardees, from savings apps to a Brazilian tokenisation platform, plan to use it as their yield module. For end users the practical question is which strategy a given wallet's vault uses; see best yield aggregators for the trade-offs of this model.

Sushi — concentrated liquidity from a multichain DEX

Sushi went live on Stellar on 10 February 2026 with its V3 concentrated-liquidity AMM, bringing a large multichain DEX to the network. DefiLlama showed $15.2M on 6 October, notably heavy in stablecoins and tokenised credit: USDC, USDT0, and Centrifuge's deJTRSY and deJAAA.

Upshift named Sushi as one of four venues for its opening Stellar vaults, alongside Blend, Aquarius and Templar. DefiLlama does not yet track Sushi's Stellar volume, so we cannot rank it on trading activity. Concentrated ranges earn more fees per dollar but magnify impermanent loss and need active management.

Templar — cross-chain lending

Templar is a lending protocol that lets Stellar users deposit XLM and borrow USDC, using NEAR's multi-party computation network and chain signatures rather than a bridge. DefiLlama has tracked it on Stellar since December 2025; it held $13.3M on 6 October 2026, mostly XLM, plus about 3.6M deJAAA tokenised credit.

The RWA collateral is what sets it apart: alongside XLM, Templar holds tokenised credit such as Centrifuge's deJAAA. The added dependency is NEAR's MPC network, which sits outside Stellar's own security. For how tokenised assets behave as collateral, see RWAs as DeFi collateral.

Soroswap — AMM and aggregator

Soroswap is a constant-product AMM on Soroban with a fixed 0.30% fee, plus an aggregator that splits trades across other AMMs. Its pools held $1.2M on 6 October 2026, down from a peak of $9.8M in July 2025, so its role today is more router than liquidity venue.

Soroswap's docs say its core contracts are non-upgradeable and were audited by OtterSec, and its aggregator by Runtime Verification; adapters for Soroswap, Phoenix and Aquarius are registered on-chain (a Comet adapter exists in its code but is not registered, as of 8 October 2026). DefiLlama tracked only about $15K of Soroswap pool volume over the past 30 days. The comparison with Aquarius is in Aquarius vs Soroswap.

XOXNO Lending — LP tokens as collateral

XOXNO Lending is an overcollateralised lending market that went live on Stellar in September 2026, after a $135K Stellar Community Fund award. Its distinctive feature is accepting Aquarius LP tokens as collateral. It held about $131K on 6 October 2026, so treat it as very early.

Its configuration lists Aquarius LPs at a 50% loan-to-value ratio and a 60% liquidation threshold, which we work through in borrowing against Aquarius LP tokens. Small TVL means thin borrow markets: rates can jump when one user borrows a lot.

Reflector — the oracle underneath

Reflector is not somewhere to deposit; it is the price oracle many Stellar protocols read. A quorum of nodes run by Stellar ecosystem organisations compute prices independently and publish them on-chain through the SEP-40 interface, with free feeds updating every five minutes.

Its README describes on-chain Stellar prices sourced from RPC nodes and other prices from exchanges, DeFi venues, forex markets and aggregators, and cites Blend as an integration. Reflector's role in the February YieldBlox exploit shows the limit of any oracle: a feed that faithfully reports a thin market will faithfully report a manipulated price. That failure belongs to how a pool chooses its feeds, which is why pool configuration is worth reading.

How these fit together

Stellar DeFi is a short stack. Reflector prices assets; Blend and Aquarius hold most of the deposits; vaults sit on top and move funds between them; aggregators route trades across the AMMs. The vault boom of 2026 means a growing share of deposits arrive through a curator rather than directly, and that money is concentrated in two protocols. A failure in Blend or Aquarius would reach most vault users too, and a curated vault adds its own contract and curator to that risk rather than removing it.

Two platforms were left out deliberately. FxDAO, a stablecoin protocol, held over $11M at the start of 2026 but has shown $0 on DefiLlama since June. Phoenix, an early Soroban DEX, held $47.5K. Both may be operating, but neither has the deposits to rank. For a broader map, see the Stellar DeFi guide.

The takeaway

Match the platform to the job: Blend to lend or borrow, Aquarius to trade or earn liquidity rewards, a vault only if you understand where it deposits. Ranking by TVL tells you where the money is, not where it is safest. Check each pool's collateral and oracle, each vault's allocation and withdrawal terms, and how much of a protocol's TVL is a single volatile asset.

Sources: DefiLlama API (protocols, chains, historical chain TVL, protocol, fees and DEX endpoints), read 6 October 2026; Blend backstop documentation; Aquarius documentation; Sentora research (16 July 2026) and Lumen Loop on Stellar DeFi Hub and Upshift; Upshift, "How USDC on Stellar works"; DeFindex website; Sushi, "Sushi is Live on the Stellar Network" (10 February 2026); Templar's Stellar page; Soroswap documentation; SCF #43 and #45 round recaps; Reflector contract README. WhaleHub is the publisher of this article.