Stellar Lumens has vowed to prioritize decentralized finance in its latest roadmap, aiming to greatly improve and grow its decentralized financial reach.

The Stellar Foundation’s recent roadmap outlined a need to increase active user wallets and increase total value locked (TVL) by onboarding institutions, businesses, and DeFi users.

In recent weeks, the XLM token bounced strongly from a falling wedge pattern as Bitcoin rebounded from the effects of Trump’s tariffs and economic uncertainty.

Stellar Lumens: Can XLM become a network of DeFi expansion?

Stellar Lumens is commonly known as a network for businesses and individuals to make secure, fast payments, with the XLM token acting similarly to Ripple’s XRP.

Since its foundation, Stellar Lumens has been adopted by leading traditional financial companies and payment platforms including MoneyGram, Bosch, USDC issuer Circle and Franklin Templeton. 

With Circle’s Circle Payment Network due to launch soon, MoneyGram, working closely with Stellar to enable crypto payments on their platform, will be working alongside Circle on their cross-border network.

Investors have seen Stellar as a network for centralized, traditional financial use cases, and less of a network with strong DeFi experience where users are able to create token projects, earn various yields, and farm tokens.

According to the foundation, DeFi will take priority going forward, with the team aiming to increase active XLM active wallets to 5 million a month while aiming for a $1.5 billion DeFi TVL.

DeFi on Stellar Lumens

As of May 2025, DeFi on Stellar Lumens has a TVL of $47.33M, with its stablecoin market capitalization at $348.86M.

A large chunk of Stellar Lumens TVL comes from real-world asset tokenization led by Franklin Templeton, settling over $400 million in assets onchain.

According to RWA.xyz, Stellar is handling $506 million in real-world assets from Circle, WisdomTree, and Franklin Templeton.

Is the future of DeFi on XLM?

Whether the future of DeFi is on XLM will depend on how well the Stellar Foundation can execute its roadmap and increase TVL via various methods, including onboarding dApp developers.

Sui and Aptos have boosted DeFi onboarding by incentivising developers to build on the network, offering a range of promotions and benefits.

Similarly, Hedera Hashgraph has also prioritized DeFi growth by incentivising developers who are building dApps based around AI or decentralized trading with funds from the Hedera Council.