Stellar draws growing government interest as Meridian 2026 opens, says M1X Global’s Goldman

Governments are paying closer attention to Stellar. That is the read from Jordan Goldman, President and COO of M1X Global, who says the network’s focus on real-world financial applications is drawing growing interest from public-sector players.

The timing is hard to miss. His comments land as Meridian 2026, the Stellar Development Foundation’s annual conference, gets underway in Lisbon. The crowd there skews toward banks, market infrastructure firms and asset managers.

A repo deal sets the stage

Goldman has more than a hunch to point to. On October 23, he announced that M1X Global had executed the first institutional repo transaction on the Stellar network.

A repo, short for repurchase agreement, works a bit like a very formal pawn shop. One party hands over high-quality assets as collateral, borrows cash, and agrees to buy those assets back later.

The M1X deal used USDM1, which the company describes as a sovereign bond token. It is fully backed by short-term US Treasuries.

The pitch behind the trade is programmable collateral financing that runs 24/7. According to Goldman, that capability is exactly the kind of feature drawing government attention.

Meridian 2026: who showed up and what’s on the agenda

Meridian 2026 began on October 28 in Lisbon, Portugal, and is scheduled to wrap on October 29. The program centers on institutional finance, payments, developer tools, tokenization and ecosystem growth.

The speaker list reads less like a crypto meetup and more like a finance industry roundtable. Denelle Dixon of the Stellar Development Foundation is on the bill, alongside Nadine Chakar of DTCC Digital Assets. Anthony Scaramucci of SkyBridge is also speaking. Banking is represented by Jamie Walker of U.S. Bank.

On the technical side, attendees are expected to hear about the Bell protocol. The upgrade is aimed at improving ledger speed and quantum security.

Before the main event, developers gathered for HackMeridian, a hackathon held October 25 to 26.

Tokenized government debt keeps showing up

Goldman’s repo trade was not the only government-debt story attached to the week. Archax announced €GOVY, a product built around tokenized government bills.

Background: Meridian’s growing footprint

The 2025 edition of Meridian drew over 1,000 attendees from approximately 65 countries.

This year’s agenda leans harder into institutional and policy conversations. Stellar has long positioned itself around payments and financial access rather than speculative trading, and the 2026 lineup reflects that identity.

What this means

For Stellar, the most important development here is not a speaker list. It is the repo transaction. A completed institutional repo deal backed by US Treasuries is a working use case in one of finance’s most essential markets.

One repo trade is a milestone, not a market. The real test is whether more institutions run similar transactions, at larger scale, and keep running them.

What to watch next is concrete. Follow-on repo deals using USDM1 or similar tokens, uptake of products like Archax’s €GOVY, and the rollout timeline for the Bell protocol will say far more than any keynote.