Their rules.

By Andrés Peña Mellado

Stellar Barrio existed before Tellus opened its space in Providencia and can continue to exist without it. Events are its current form. The mission reaches further: turning conversations, builders, and projects into everyday uses of Stellar in Santiago.

The Tellus Coop Blockchain Hub operates at Triana 861, Providencia, but Stellar Barrio began before that address. “Barrio existed before the hub, so it can definitely exist without the hub,” explains Joaquín Farfán.

Joaquín is there almost every day of the week. His routine begins around 8:30 in the morning: buy a coffee, sit down, and work through his tasks. Before reaching that desk, he had built Sozu Capital, participated in Instawards with SozuPay, and begun organizing activities for Tellus in Santiago. The physical space came later, after work that Joaquín dates to early 2026 with Bastian Koh.

A mission beyond the event

When he defines Stellar Barrio, Joaquín does not start with the calendar:

“StellarBarrio is a mission that was born in the Lastarria neighborhood and that we have now brought to the Triana neighborhood in Providencia. To implement infrastructure that lets merchants receive stablecoins and manage their cash flow with programmable money built on the Stellar network. To give Stellar a place in everyday life [...] for established merchants in Lastarria, Triana, and eventually the rest of the city.”

Events are the program’s visible form today, but that definition points toward merchants, payments, and cash flow. Earlier, at Tellus, we examined how U.S. Bank brought a stablecoin to Stellar and what controls it retained over the asset. Stellar Barrio looks at the problem from a different scale, asking what would have to happen for tools built on that network to become useful in a city’s everyday life.

For now, the work happens mainly through gatherings. Joaquín describes it without trying to turn it into a fixed formula:

“There is no set mechanism for the cycles. We aim for 30 people per event and six events a month. I propose the events and their subjects, and they take place or not according to Tellus’s schedule.”

The first sessions also brought less comfortable lessons. He says that some budgets were approved with little advance notice, leaving less time for online promotion and ultimately affecting attendance. Joaquín estimates about 20 people per event across the three activities held, although the smaller groups left more room to discuss each project.

Joaquín names Cevolta, QWATT, and Myconvive as three projects that emerged around Stellar Barrio and are entering the Stellar ecosystem’s grants and support process.

Builders who come back

Joaquín does not measure the program only by how many people come to an activity. His answer about what he watches to know whether Barrio is working goes elsewhere:

“Builders who return, ideas that grow out of conversations at events, projects deployed in Tellus hackathons, and long-term follow-up to build a support network centered on developing projects with global reach and vision.”

That continuity also comes through when he distinguishes Barrio from Stellar Academy. Both are entry points, though they serve different moments in a builder’s journey.

“StellarBarrio is an introductory gateway to identify builders with the potential to build on Stellar over the long term and contribute to the mission of implementing solutions for everyday use in the neighborhood and the city of Santiago. Stellar Academy is a somewhat more introductory setting for university students to learn about the world of opportunities on the Stellar network. They are different things with similar goals.”

During these weeks, part of that journey leads to Find Your Way and then to HackMeridian, which will take place on October 25 and 26 in Lisbon. For Find Your Way, Joaquín hopes for 150 builds, 60 of them from Santiago, and for six builders connected to Stellar Barrio to travel to Portugal with Tellus’s support.

What comes next

Joaquín identifies a layer that neither Barrio nor Stellar Academy covers yet:

“An acceleration program focused on covering the technical material that neither StellarBarrio nor StellarAcademy covers today, because they serve as introductions to the ecosystem. A platform connecting projects with global accelerators and investment networks in innovation at the intersection of blockchain and AI.”

Today Stellar Barrio works through gatherings, projects, and people coming back. Its mission is for that movement to find a use outside the room: merchants receiving stablecoins, people managing programmable money, and solutions born in Santiago that can continue growing inside and outside Chile.

For someone still looking at Stellar from the outside, Joaquín puts it much more simply:

“Come to the events and dare to start something.”