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!