“Stellar wants to change the payments world, to connect various financial systems, to allow money to move peer-to-peer, and for that counts with the partnership of IBM and 37 other companies, and Y-Combinator and Stripe as investors. New partnerships are promised to be announced soon….”

Statistics

Coin Name: Stellar
Token: XLM
Birth of project: 2014
Project Status: Pending
Circulating Supply: 18,468,065,639 XLM
Validation: Stellar Consensus Protocol

Official Links

Official website: https://www.stellar.org/
Official Wallet: https://www.stellar.org/lumens/wallets/
Explorer: https://dashboard.stellar.org/
Other: https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code/

Introduction to Stellar (XLM)

Stellar was created in 2014 with the purpose of exchanging and issuing digital assets, to act as an exchange bridge that allows very close to real-time operations. Comparing the speed with Bitcoin or Ethereum, it is much faster, taking just seconds, and they transactions cost almost nothing, 0.00003 cents to be exact.

Jeb McCaleb, Stellar co-founder, presents it as the blockchain technology to facilitate cross-border payments in multiple currencies, something that currently can take several days. Jeb is well-known in the crypto world, as responsible from Mt GOX prior to the hack, but also as a part of the Ripple team, which he left in disagreement to create an improved and decentralized Ripple, named Stellar.

Stellar can be seen as a payment infrastructure, connecting banks and their payment systems all the way to people, issuing tokens that represent the commonly used currencies from the different countries. Stellar allows automatic currency conversion when payments are made across-borders.

Stellar also features a simple smart contracts system, deliberately limited to avoid hacks. It doesn’t allow complex contracts like Ethereum does, but these are also less likely to be hacked and, therefore, less vulnerable to thefts. Being a platform it’s possible to have ICOs on Stellar.

Stellar doesn’t has hundreds of ICOs, but Mobius, Smartlands, KIN and SatoshiPay are some of the projects that elected the platform because of superior performance speeds and scalability. Apart from being a payment method and a platform, Stellar also has the planned goal for 2018 of developing its Decentralized Exchange – SDEX, even if not much information about it is available yet -, and as a second goal for 2018 – implementing the Lightning Network.

Stellar wants to change the payments world, to connect various financial systems, to allow money to move peer-to-peer, and for that counts with the partnership of IBM and 37 other companies, and Y-Combinator and Stripe as investors. New partnerships are promised to be announced soon.

Challenges also are ahead for Stellar, namely accessing the financial services to gain massive adoption. Currently, Stellar’s cross-border payments are still limited to seven fiat currencies that include British pounds and the Australian dollar, so there is still a lot of ground to be covered. It’s necessary that Stellar continues to grow to be fully adopted by their main partners, IBM and Stripe.

This is a brief introduction to Stellar, but if you want to know more about the coin, what people are saying about it, technical details, jump right in any of the links we present below. They are well worth reading before investing!

2 Comments

  1. jaymish

    I like where the world is generally heading. People are committed to finding solutions to their many problems. Transferring money from one part of the globe to the next is often a tedious task. Sometimes a transfer can take upto 7 days and the currency conversion rate is horrible. At first Stellar looks like bitcoin, but the more you listen to the presentation the more you realize that it is diffrent. It’s diffrence lies in the fact it searches for the best conversion rate from a list of currencies. This has great potential for international money transfer.

    • avsf

      Yep, the main difference between Stellar and Bitcoin, presently, is the speed Stellar has, as it can achieve VISA like speed, which is something pretty impressive. Also, a partnership with IBM is something big for Stellar, but this doesn’t mean full adoption from IBM or other companies that process payments. It’s long road for crypto adoption.

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