Stellar network metrics climb across the board as XLM posts a 20% weekly gain

Price and On-Chain Activity Pick Up Steam

Stellar's native token $XLM is trading near $0.19, up roughly 20% over the past seven days. Daily trading volume has jumped 47% to $389 million, pushing the network's market capitalisation to approximately $6.64 billion. DeFi total value locked on the Stellar blockchain has risen to $259 million, with over 1.21 billion XLM tokens locked in various DeFi protocols, according to DefiLlama.

The price move comes as broader technical momentum builds around the token. Stellar's blockchain performance recently reached 3,351 transactions per second, marking a roughly 65% increase in its theoretical capacity, reinforcing the network's scalability narrative.

Real-World Assets and Stablecoin Volume Drive the Fundamental Case

Beyond the price action, the more durable story may be what is happening on the institutional side. Real-world assets on @StellarOrg now stand at $3.28 billion, up 7.7% over the past 30 days per rwa.xyz. Stablecoin transfer volume over the same 30-day window climbed 35% to $7.89 billion.

Since the beginning of 2026, Stellar has crossed the $1 billion, $2 billion, and $3 billion RWA milestones, driven by high-speed institutional adoption from the likes of Franklin Templeton, Ondo Finance, and others. The network now hosts tokenized real-world assets across 70 products, placing Stellar second only to Ethereum in this category.

Much of the acceleration traces back to Protocol 26, nicknamed "Yardstick," which went live on Stellar's mainnet on May 6, 2026. The upgrade added a governed on-chain freeze mechanism for compliance and improved 256-bit arithmetic, giving the network the precision needed to settle institutional-grade financial instruments accurately.

US Treasury bonds dominate Stellar's RWA ecosystem at 94.8% of total value, led by Franklin Templeton's BENJI token, followed by WisdomTree's tokenized funds, Ondo Finance's USDY, and Mercado Bitcoin's tokenized fixed income and equity instruments. The combination of rising on-chain activity, growing institutional RWA adoption, and improving throughput metrics appears to be giving traders a concrete reason to re-rate the asset beyond short-term speculation.

Sources
DefiLlama: Stellar DeFi TVL and Chain Metrics
RWA.xyz: Stellar Real-World Asset Data
CoinMarketCap: Stellar XLM Latest Updates