Architecture Overview

The Core Principle

The Anchor Platform owns the protocol; our code owns the business.

NordStern acts as the business server in the Stellar ecosystem. We never reimplement SEP-1, SEP-10, SEP-12, or SEP-24 ourselves — the official Stellar Anchor Platform (AP) does that. Our business server only answers the decisions the AP delegates to it.

Architecture Map

NordStern consists of several distinct services operating together in a local Docker compose environment (for the MVP):

• db (Postgres): Holds both anchordb (used by the Anchor Platform) and controldb (used by our control plane).
• anchor-platform: The official Stellar SEP server. Wallets and users talk here on port 8080. Our business server communicates with its Platform API on port 8085.
• business-server: Our custom Node.js/Express server that handles callbacks from the Anchor Platform, renders the SEP-24 interactive UI, and performs Stellar network operations.
• control-plane: A separate service handling tenant authentication and keypair provisioning, acting as the seed for our future multi-tenant SaaS.
• frontend: The Next.js operator dashboard and functional wallet for testing.

Data Flow

Money movement in NordStern is asynchronous and status-driven.

Transaction state lives authoritatively in the Anchor Platform database. The state is advanced via Platform API PATCH requests and the Stellar Observer — not by synchronous request/response cycles. New flows are designed around status transitions and webhooks/callbacks.

When a Stellar payment arrives, it is matched by memo. We never assume synchronous settlement and never blindly retry a fund movement on a 5xx error without checking status first.