Ella Qiang - Director of Partnerships at Stellar - recently expanded on Stellar's 2018 plans and progress at a meetup with GOPAX and Mobius. Watch the full video here.

On the purpose of the Lightning Network:

We are working on integrating with the Lightning Network, which will help with the scalability of Stellar when there is more traffic on the network. It will also support private channeling so that transactions can happen privately - that is also a functionality that our partner targets require.

This implies that SDF is preparing for a potential scenario in which more than 1000-3000 transactions / second are happening on the network, and they are addressing some of the privacy concerns that have been brought up.

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The SDEX UI team is based in New York, and the UI may look similar to Binance:

A top priority for us this year is to build a nice UI frontend for the Stellar decentralized exchange - we call it SDEX for now. We have recently recruited a great team based in New York for building a frontend for SDEX. The goal would be from the user perspective, if you log onto SDEX, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you are using some centralized exchange like Binance vs a UI for a decentralized exchange.

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An update on IBM’s interbank transfer pilot coming mid-year:

With interbank transfer, this project is led by the IBM team. Currently, there are 14 banks involved in that project. From the announcement by IBM, at some point mid-year, there’s going to be more updates on where things are with those pilots.

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Ongoing conversations with central banks about potentially using Stellar to issue country currencies on the network:

We are also talking to a few central banks about the possibility of issuing central-bank-backed digital currencies on the blockchain. Stellar is one of the candidates that central bankers are considering.

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On a small token exodus from Ethereum to Stellar:

There are projects that have launched their tokens as ERC20 (Ethereum-based token protocol), had the fundraising phase, and are now migrating from Ethereum to Stellar as they deploy the project. We are expecting 20-ish projects issuing their token on Stellar in the first half of this year.

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More Korean remittance partners and a Korean anchor coming:

Now, we are also in the process of closing another two [remittance companies] in Korea, so there will be a Korean anchor on Stellar issuing KRW on the Stellar decentralized network.

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More remittance company partnerships around the world are coming:

By the end of this year, you will see more [remittance] partners from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and more from the countries where we already have anchors such as Singapore. And more in other parts of the world like the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and South America.

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Stellar has been a decentralized exchange for 3 years already:

Stellar is a decentralized exchange, and we have been up and running for the past 3 years. This is what enables cross border and cross asset transactions on Stellar.