What to build on Stellar

Many people have started building Stellar applications and infrastructure, but even more have been asking for suggestions or a place to get started. Here are a few examples of the kinds of things you could build on top of Stellar. They’re not all new ideas, but they would be new to the Stellar ecosystem.

 Applications

• Games. Many games already have virtual credits. Imagine embedding those credits into the Stellar ledger (or just making those credits be stellars). This would make them instantly tradable, and something that users could bring with them from game to game.
• Psychology experiments (just let people know that they’re in an experiment). There are many classic experiments, such as the dollar auction, which are really interesting to read about. With Stellar, you could actually implement them and see how people behave in practice.
• Apps for tracking and paying back expenses among friends. Backing these apps by credits on the Stellar ledger would be very interesting, and mean that people can trade around their debts, and have those interact with other debts external to the app. A place to start might be porting Bluechips to use Stellar.
• Micropayment paywall. Stellar’s low transaction fees make it plausible for doing micropayments. You could imagine either a hosted solution or open-source code to make paywall implementation really easy.
• Prediction markets. Stellar makes it very easy to track and trade credits representing various predictions (independent of whether or not they’re convertible to cash).
• Hosted payment notifier. Sign up for notifications (via email or SMS) when your account receives a payment.
• Bot that performs a function when you send it stellar, or that has a pool of stellar to send out. Perhaps it sends it back to you, perhaps it sends out a happy Tweet, perhaps lets you send tips to others.
• Micropayment-based CAPTCHA replacement. Lots of people have proposed systems like this (since they’re cheap for normal users, but expensive for spammers). It’d be very interesting to see how one performs in the real world.
• Better CLI. A good easy-to-install command line client for managing wallets and sending/receiving transactions.
• Good in-browser stellar.js library for interacting with the network; bindings in other languages.
• An authentication system/standard on top of Stellar (here’s a proof-of-concept in that direction).
• Site that responds when you send it stellars. Perhaps it’s a jukebox (like BTC jukebox); maybe it turns colors or tallies votes.

 Infrastructure

There’s also a lot of infrastructure yet to be built. (Many of these are also reflected in the FAQ; which will be updated as ideas are fleshed out. Note also that many of these likely have equivalents already created for Bitcoin or Ripple.)

• Mobile client. Let people carry around their Stellar wallets with them. This could potentially start using a QR-code system, though it may not be necessary given usernames.
• Desktop client. For those who don’t like using a web client.
• Trading client. Make it easier to execute trades directly on the Stellar network.
• Ledger explorer. It’d be great to see things like number of nodes, wallets, transaction volume, transactions per day, etc. See the following real-time transaction feed for inspiration.
• Gateways. The really exciting stuff begins once we have a few gateways up and running. Please get in touch if you’re interested in building one.
• Point-of-sale iPad app. Make it easy for people to pay using Stellar in person. This could integrate with a mobile client.

 Documentation

One of the best things you can do to help the ecosystem is help make it easier for others to join. Here are some suggestions for what to create:

• Tutorials for how to get started building. If you build something (even a toy app), a walkthrough would be awesome!
• Translations of the Stellar site (there’s already a Portugese one!).

If you end up building things on Stellar (or want to talk things over before diving in), I’d love to hear about it.