This Country Is Going Onchain — And Ripple Rival Stellar Just Landed The Deal

Why Stellar

Stellar’s selection is not incidental. The network was purpose-built for regulated financial services — public and permissionless by design, but configurable with the asset controls that sovereign and institutional deployments require, per the press release.

Transactions settle in seconds at fractions of a US cent. The network also operates one of the world’s largest cash on and off-ramp networks for digital assets, a feature that matters significantly for an island economy dependent on accessible liquidity channels.

Bermuda’s regulatory foundation further supports the choice. The island established the Digital Asset Business Act in 2018 — one of the world’s earliest comprehensive digital asset regulatory frameworks — giving the SDF a jurisdiction with existing legal infrastructure rather than a blank slate.

Denelle Dixon, CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation, noted in the release that Bermuda has assembled what most jurisdictions cannot: regulatory clarity, an aligned ecosystem, and a government willing to lead.

XLM's price moving sideways following a steep decline in late 2025, as seen on the daily chart. Source: XLMUSD on Tradingview 

The announcement is not Stellar’s first sovereign deployment. The Republic of the Marshall Islands completed the world’s first nationwide onchain disbursement of universal basic income via USDM1 on the Stellar network in December 2025, per the press release — a precedent that Bermuda’s program now builds on.

This development marks a pivotal moment for the nascent sector’s relationship with sovereign financial infrastructure. A national government committing to move its payment economy on-chain is no longer a theoretical use case for blockchain technology — it is an operational one, and Stellar just became the network powering the world’s first attempt to prove it works at national scale.

Cover image from ChatGPT, XLMUSD chart on Tradingview