samieazubike · spiffamani · Mar 29, 2026
diff --git a/research/anchor-kit-submission.md b/research/anchor-kit-submission.md
@@ -0,0 +1,82 @@
+# Anchor-Kit — Stellar Wave Research Submission
+
+## Project Selected
+
+- **Project:** Anchor-Kit
+- **Wave source:** `0xNgoo/anchor-kit` — Stellar Wave Program repository
+- **Domain:** Stellar Anchor Infrastructure / Developer Tooling / Payments
+- **Repository:** https://github.com/0xNgoo/anchor-kit
+- **Category:** Tools
+
+## Why This Project
+
+Anchor-Kit addresses one of the most significant barriers to Stellar ecosystem growth — the complexity of building SEP-compliant anchor services. While Stellar's SEP (Stellar Ecosystem Proposal) standards define how fiat-to-crypto bridges should work, implementing them correctly requires deep protocol knowledge, careful security implementation, and significant boilerplate. Anchor-Kit eliminates all of that with a developer-friendly, type-safe SDK that makes building Stellar anchors as simple as configuring a JavaScript object. This is foundational infrastructure that enables any fintech, payment provider, or bank to connect to the Stellar network.
+
+## What The Project Does
+
+Anchor-Kit is a developer-friendly, type-safe TypeScript SDK for building Stellar Anchor services. It abstracts the complexity of Stellar Ecosystem Proposals — specifically SEP-6 (Deposit and Withdrawal API), SEP-24 (Hosted Deposit and Withdrawal), and SEP-31 (Cross-Border Payments) — allowing developers to focus on business logic while ensuring protocol compliance and security.
+
+The SDK provides a complete anchor implementation out of the box:
+
+1. **SEP-24 Interactive Flows** — Hosted deposit and withdrawal flows with minimal configuration. Developers mount a single Express router and get fully compliant interactive deposit/withdrawal endpoints instantly.
+
+2. **SEP-10 Authentication** — Built-in Stellar Web Authentication handling. The SDK manages challenge generation, signature verification, and JWT token issuance without requiring developers to understand the underlying cryptography.
+
+3. **Escrow and Settlement** — Background job processing for transaction monitoring, automatic settlement triggering, and configurable retry logic for failed settlements.
+
+4. **Multi-Database Support** — SQLite for development and testing, PostgreSQL for production. The database adapter pattern allows switching between backends without changing application code.
+
+5. **Webhook Integration** — Built-in webhook signature verification and event processing, enabling real-time notifications to partner systems.
+
+## Technical Architecture
+
+Anchor-Kit uses a modular, layered architecture:
+
+**Core Layer (`src/core/`):**
+Configuration management via `AnchorConfig` with deep validation — validates Stellar keys, URLs, network passphrases, database URLs, and rate limit parameters. Immutable frozen configuration snapshots prevent runtime mutation bugs. Typed error hierarchy (`SdkError`, `ValidationError`, `HorizonSubmitError`, `EscrowNotFoundError`) enables precise error handling in consumer code.
+
+**Runtime Layer (`src/runtime/`):**
+- `SqlDatabaseAdapter` — SQL persistence for transactions, escrow records, and audit logs
+- `InMemoryQueue` — Background job processing with configurable concurrency
+- `TransactionWatcher` — Stellar Horizon polling for transaction confirmation
+- `DefaultWebhookProcessor` — Webhook signature verification and event dispatch
+- `ExpressRouter` — Drop-in Express middleware mounting all SEP endpoints
+
+**Validation Layer (`src/utils/validation.ts`):**
+Runtime schema validation for all configuration objects including `ServerConfigSchema`, providing integrators with ergonomic partial config validation before passing to `createAnchor()`.
+
+**SEP Integration:**
+The SDK integrates directly with Stellar's Horizon API for account queries, transaction submission, and status monitoring. SEP-10 challenge/response authentication uses `@stellar/stellar-sdk` for XDR transaction construction and signature verification.
+
+## Stellar Integration Details
+
+Anchor-Kit uses Stellar specifically for:
+
+- **SEP-10 Web Authentication** — Challenge transactions signed by the user's Stellar keypair, verified server-side
+- **SEP-24 Interactive Deposit/Withdrawal** — JWT-authenticated interactive flows linked to Stellar transactions
+- **Horizon API Integration** — Real-time transaction monitoring via polling with configurable intervals
+- **Network Support** — Testnet, mainnet, and futurenet with automatic passphrase resolution
+- **Transaction Submission** — Signed XDR transaction submission with error code parsing and retry logic
+
+## Independent Research Assessment
+
+Anchor-Kit fills a genuine gap in the Stellar developer ecosystem. Building SEP-compliant anchors from scratch typically requires 2-3 months of development time and deep Stellar protocol expertise. Anchor-Kit reduces this to hours. The library's strict TypeScript types, comprehensive validation, and modular architecture indicate production-ready engineering standards.
+
+The SDK ships with 85+ unit tests covering configuration validation, error handling, database adapters, queue processing, and webhook verification. The `ServerConfigSchema` export enables integrators to validate partial configurations programmatically — a small but ergonomic improvement that reduces misconfiguration errors in production deployments.
+
+## Verified Repository Artifacts
+
+- **Repository:** https://github.com/0xNgoo/anchor-kit
+- **Package:** `anchor-kit` v0.0.4-beta
+- **Key exports verified:** `createAnchor`, `AnchorInstance`, `ValidationError`, `ServerConfigSchema`, `validateServerConfig`
+- **Stellar SDK dependency:** `@stellar/stellar-sdk ^14.6.0`
+- **SEPs implemented:** SEP-6, SEP-24, SEP-31, SEP-10
+
+## Submission Confirmed
+
+Live submission completed successfully on March 29, 2026.
+
+- **Hub URL:** https://usestellarwavehub.vercel.app
+- **Status:** SUBMITTED (pending admin approval)
+- **Account:** spiffamani
+- **Submitted:** 29/03/2026