Stellar Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon has responded to the recent classification of digital assets, which notably includes XLM as a digital commodity. Dixon emphasized that this designation is not merely a formality but a strong confirmation of Stellar's long-standing strategy. She highlighted that regulatory guidance explicitly categorizing XLM as a digital commodity aligns with the Stellar Foundation's and the XLM community's foundational belief that XLM was built as a public good specifically for facilitating global payments.

The arrival of commodity status for XLM is particularly timely, coinciding with Stellar's significant evolution from primarily a network for transfers into a robust and powerful ecosystem. A key driver of this growth is the previously launched smart contract platform, Soroban, which has rapidly emerged as a central hub for tokenized real-world assets (RWA). Data from rwa.xyz indicates that the distributed asset value on the Stellar network now exceeds an impressive $1.4 billion, underscoring its increasing utility in this domain.

This new commodity status holds substantial implications for institutional players, enabling them to deploy their funds on the Stellar network with greater confidence, free from the previous concerns of regulatory claims. Among Stellar's recent breakthroughs are the operations of a money market fund from the American financial giant Franklin Templeton on its network. Furthermore, a non-U.S. government debt fund, the Spiko EU T-Bills Money Market Fund, which focuses on European treasuries, operates on Stellar and is valued at $447 million.

Significantly, XLM now shares an identical Digital Commodity status with XRP, a position achieved since March 17. This development eliminates XRP's previous unique advantage as the sole legal payment asset in the United States, a status it held following the Ripple vs. SEC court case. While both assets are now recognized similarly, their market positioning can be conditionally differentiated: XRP continues to focus on banking liquidity, whereas XLM is strategically moving into the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector and asset tokenization through its more flexible smart contracts.

Looking ahead, with regulatory oversight potentially shifting more towards the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), there is an anticipation of a wave of applications for a Stellar Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). It would be surprising if such applications do not emerge on the market by the end of the year, signaling a new chapter for institutional engagement with Stellar.