Director, Frontier Lab · Stellar Development Foundation
Tyler van der Hoeven builds the frontier surfaces where Stellar developers actually meet the protocol.
Smart contracts before there were smart contracts. Passkey wallets that don't ask permission to be useful. Vegetables that stress-test a chain. Games that prove they're fair. Agents that know which docs are still true.
- 461
- public artifacts
- 19
- topic families
- 9
- featured threads
- 13
- timeline years
- late 2019–2020 Ecosystem Evangelist, SDF Stellar Podcast, Stellar Community Fund custom-voting redesign, Practical Path Payments talk, the Turing Signing Server proposal, and the Stellar Quest launch.
- 2021–2022 Ecosystem Engineer, SDF Stellar Quest at scale, Quest Bounties, the Turrets reference protocol and Meridian 2021 "Unlocking DeFi" talk, NFT workshops, and the pivot into Soroban education.
- 2023–2024 Lead Developer Advocate, SDF Soroban tooling and writing (sorobill, the smallest-smart-contract post), FCA00C and RPCiege sieges, passkey-kit, Super Peach multisig, Launchtube, and the KALE launch.
- 2025–July 2026 Developer Advocate Director, SDF KALE and its farming community, smart-account-kit, stellar-mcp-server, x402 and MPP agent-payment demos, Kalien and other ZK games, and the Meridian 2025 "Machines Can Code" talk.
- July 2026–present Director, Frontier Lab, SDF Leads Frontier Lab, where SDF builds and experiments in public, and owns its major projects, Stellar Raven and walleterm, plus side experiments like SoroDOOM and Polly Wallet.
featured · 9 case studies
Nine threads through SDF.
From the pre-Soroban Turrets proposal through KALE, x402, ZK-proven games, and Stellar Raven — these are the work threads with the deepest public trail. Each thread is anchored to the part of the Stellar developer experience it changed.
-
early SDF · 2020–2023
Stellar Quest
Education as a playable adoption loop
A multi-series learning system that turned Stellar into challenges, bounties, live shows, and Soroban quests. Tyler led its design and tooling across series, plus the bounties that ran between them.
We made learning the protocol feel like a game you could win — and people kept showing up between seasons, so we built bounties.
Impact. Series 5 alone reached 2,344 unique accounts, awarded 6,069 badges, and distributed 1,007,400 XLM. Quest reframed onboarding as a recurring, gamified loop with graduation paths into Soroban.
Artifacts.
Stellar Quest·Stellar Quest Bounties·soroban-quest·soroban-quest-pioneer -
early SDF · 2020–2021
Stellar Turrets
A pre-Soroban smart-contract frontier
Before Stellar had native smart contracts, Tyler proposed and prototyped Turing Signing Servers — a pattern for offchain expressive logic that signed back into Stellar. Turrets followed: a federated reference protocol, demos, and DeFi-shaped use cases.
I needed a way to make Stellar do programmable things now, before the protocol was ready — Turrets was that bridge.
Impact. It made the future direction of expressive Stellar contracts tangible — and primed the ecosystem to think about contracts, fees, and DeFi long before Soroban shipped.
Artifacts.
turing-signing-server·stellar-turrets·Headless Turret·Meridian 2021 talk -
Soroban onboarding · 2023–2024
FCA00C & RPCiege
Fast, cheap, out of control developer games
When Soroban needed real-world stress and real-world delight, Tyler co-created Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (FCA00C) and built RPCiege, its series of siege-themed contract challenges. Each siege turned a hard primitive into a playable workshop.
Workshops nobody remembered weren't enough — we wanted developers to laugh, sweat, and remember the contract they shipped.
Impact. FCA00C and RPCiege turned protocol education into theater: live coding competitions, livestreamed sieges, and Codespaces-ready workshops that also drew serious builders into Soroban.
Artifacts.
rpciege.com·stellar/fca00c-asteroids·rpciege-sveltekit·siege series 4 & 5 -
Soroban onboarding · 2022–2024
Soroban builder-educator
Tools, docs, and runnable explanations
A concentrated run of small contracts, auth explainers, cost tooling, demos, workshops, and developer-meeting notes that translated new Soroban primitives into things developers could read and run the same afternoon.
If I couldn't write the smallest possible contract, the docs hadn't earned the right to ask anyone to write a bigger one.
Impact. Tools like sorobill made cost a first-class concern. Posts like "Understanding Soroban Auth" and "Writing the Smallest Smart Contract" shaped how many developers first met the platform.
Artifacts.
sorobill·soroban-authplore·stellar-worker-boilerplate·soroban-events-queue -
ecosystem engineering · 2024–2025
Smart Wallets & Launchtube
Account abstraction, made shippable
A flagship thread connecting passkey-powered accounts, multisig demos, smart-wallet SDKs, and fee-sponsored transaction submission. Tyler put forward the smart-wallet public-good proposal and shepherded the kit-and-relayer stack into the Stellar ecosystem.
The whole point of a wallet is to disappear. Passkeys + smart accounts + Launchtube was how we tried to make signing feel like opening an app.
Impact. passkey-kit reached 500 GitHub stars; Super Peach demoed multisig with biometrics; Launchtube became the sponsored-submission backbone until OpenZeppelin Relayer replaced it. At Meridian 2024, Tyler made the case in "Enabling DeFi Adoption Through Passkeys."
Artifacts.
passkey-kit·soroban-passkey·superpeach·smart-account-kit·launchtube -
ecosystem engineering → agentic AI · 2024–2025
KALE
Proof-of-teamwork as ecosystem activator
A Stellar asset with a proof-of-teamwork Soroban contract, command-line and browser farmers, and a community that grew around it. Tyler launched the contract in November 2024, and SDF's blog calls KALE the largest stress test for smart contracts on Stellar so far.
KALE was the punchline that turned out to be the strategy. Vegetables really did make the chain busier.
Impact. Drove smart contract activity on mainnet at scale, generated months of network-level data, and proved a playful thesis: surfaces that look silly can still produce serious developer learning, ecosystem energy, and protocol feedback.
Artifacts.
KALE-sc·KALE-farmer·kale-site·fcm-miner-rust -
agentic AI · 2025–2026
x402, MCP & Agentic Payments
Stellar as the rail for machine-to-machine payments
stellar-mcp-server and the Meridian 2025 talk start the arc; an x402 generative NFT service and an MPP payment-channel demo carry it into 2026. Together they wire Stellar into agent-native workflows: composable contracts, cheap experimentation, weekend-scale financial apps.
The agentic opportunity in payments is a software-native loop where an agent can discover the price, authorize a bounded spend, prove payment, and unlock access autonomously.
Impact. stellar-mcp-server turned Soroban contracts into agent tools, the NFT service sold art behind x402 micropayments, and the MPP demo let people pay per message to an AI over a Soroban payment channel: working prototypes that other teams could fork.
Artifacts.
stellar-mcp-server·x402-nft-service·stellar-mpp-demo -
agentic AI · 2025–2026
Kalien, Ohloss & ZK Games
Provable play on Stellar
Game-shaped demos and zero-knowledge experiments that turn hard primitives into playable, inspectable systems: Kalien (provably fair Asteroids built on compact gameplay tapes), zkp-maze, zkp-pong, Ohloss, and a Groth16 verifier. In 2026, SoroDOOM takes the idea to Doom: each session runs in a Soroban-compatible execution layer and settles on Stellar as a replay.
Games are a great excuse to ship hard cryptography. If the proof verifies, the result counts — that's the whole spec.
Impact. Kalien anchors the SDF YouTube walkthrough on what ZK on Stellar means in practice; the Ohloss, Pong, and Maze repos, plus the Weekly Coding Session livestreams, give the ecosystem a ZK proving ground that anyone can clone.
Artifacts.
kalien·ohloss·zkp-maze·zkp-pong·groth16_verifier·sorodoom -
Frontier Lab · 2026
Stellar Raven & Agent Tooling
Giving agents the truth about Stellar
Stellar Raven is the MCP server Tyler built to give agents one sign-in to official Stellar docs, live ecosystem data, and tested playbooks. Raven Jev, its command-line companion, searches Stellar sources and scores what it finds. For signing, walleterm lets an agent ask for a Stellar signature while the private key stays in 1Password.
Your agents need to know the truth in order to act on it. Most truth is a garden, not granite. It grows organically. It changes.
Impact. Live since early July 2026, Raven was presented at the July 16 Stellar Developers Meeting. Stellar's Building with AI docs call it the recommended path for agents; Tellus Cooperative and Boundless published guides, and SDF's HackMeridian livestreams teach it. In August it caught a docs pull request that called Protocol 28 live on mainnet before it was.
Artifacts.
stellar-raven·stellar-raven-jev·walleterm·stellar-error-mcp
timeline · 2014 → 2026
A decade-long arc, year by year.
From the pre-SDF maker years through the Soroban pivot, the agentic AI period, and Frontier Lab.
-
2014
Statamic add-ons & Baremetrics graph work
Kiwi, Statabrowser, and other Statamic add-ons open the public code trail, while his Baremetrics graph redesign starts the product-data visualization arc.
-
2015
Data visualization, Meteor, and launch muscle
tiny-graphs, the Weekend Graphing Project, and a Thinkful Meteor workshop sit alongside his work on Baremetrics launches such as Plan Insights, the Open Startups Initiative, and the Build vs. Buy Calculator.
-
2016
Tiny Bank launches on Product Hunt
A personal finance app that was his main product for nearly three years, until he sold it in 2017.
-
2017
Baremetrics & early Stellar dabbling
Tiny Stats API, Tiny Money, Yak, and Whodis extend the Tiny Anvil product run, and he helps ship Baremetrics Recover. On Stellar, Colorglyph turns custom tokens into a pixel-art trading game, and Popcoin, a Stellar-backed usage-based billing service, is named a winner of SDF's fourth Stellar Build Challenge.
-
2018
Stellar GraphQL, StellarAuth, and Crow
Stellar to GraphQL and the first StellarAuth prototypes put Stellar into the public repo trail. Crow brings crypto stats to SMS, and he works on the Baremetrics Segmentation and Benchmarks launches.
-
2019
Joins SDF as Ecosystem Evangelist
Starts in late 2019; SDF announces the hire publicly on January 17, 2020. The role centers on developer education, community onboarding, and making early ecosystem work easier to ship.
-
2020
Podcast, Community Fund, path payments, Quest
Hosts the official Stellar Podcast. Designs the Stellar Community Fund custom voting UI and anti-farming algorithm. Gives the Practical Path Payments talk and the Turing Signing Server proposal, then launches Stellar Quest.
-
2021
Quest scales; Turrets becomes a real thread
Stellar Quest passes 40,000 unique visitors across its first three series. The Turrets reference implementation, its headless variant, and the Meridian 2021 "Unlocking DeFi" talk land.
-
2022
NFT workshops & the Soroban pivot
SXSW NFT Hackathon workshop, Stellar Lounge interview, and Soroban-focused Stellar Quest Live Series 5, where Gitpod-backed quests pull developers into smart-contract learning.
-
2023
Soroban workflow, costs & RPCiege
sorobill, the Meridian 2023 "All About Tokens & Asset Contracts" talk, and the launch of FCA00C and its first RPCiege sieges.
-
2024
Passkeys, smart wallets, Launchtube, KALE
Soroban reaches mainnet alongside the smallest-smart-contract and Soroban auth posts. Then comes the most concentrated public run: passkey-kit, soroban-passkey, Super Peach, Launchtube, the smart-wallet public-good proposal, the KALE launch, and his Meridian 2024 passkeys talk.
-
2025
KALE stress tests, MCP, smart accounts, ZK
KALE becomes a public stress-test story: Tyler runs a 24-hour Futurenet farming event before Protocol 23, and SDF tells its history in "The Story of Kale." stellar-mcp-server, smart-account-kit, ZK proof experiments, and the Meridian 2025 "Machines Can Code" talk land in the same arc.
-
2026
Kalien, MPP, Frontier Lab, Stellar Raven
Kalien brings provably fair Asteroids to Stellar, and the x402 NFT service and stellar-mpp-demo take agent payments into public demos. In July, Tyler debuts Stellar Raven, the MCP server Stellar's docs recommend for agents, and steps into the role of Director, Frontier Lab. In September, Raven Jev ships, and walleterm becomes a 1Password signing companion. On the side, Polly Wallet turns transaction history into smart-account security policies, and SoroDOOM settles replayable Doom sessions on Stellar.
Archive
“Work, and stuff
will happen.”