Hello Stemians and Investors, today we gonna overview the differences between Ripple and Stellar, fasten your seatbelts we are starting

Background

Ripple - is a blockchain solution for cross-border payments. They are working with banks, the main idea is instead of making a swift the transaction amount is transferred to the equivalent amount of XRP and when it will reach the second gateway banks it will be retransferred to the original currency, helping banks to have a faster and cheaper way. Any type of currency can be exchanged including USD, euros, RMB, yen, gold, airline miles, and rupees. Ripple is centralized, most of the tokens are belonging to a few persons and held by private institutions.

Stellar - Forked from Ripple, and created by the same founder Jed McCaleb, is the same idea of fast cross-border payment as Ripple but with a few twists. First, it is an open source (decentralized) and targeting cross-border payment with merchants and ordinary people, P2P and B2B.
The Stellar protocol is supported by a nonprofit, the Stellar Development Foundation. As a nonprofit organization, they are aiming to develop the world.
You only need the XLM (Lumens coins for the transactions) and don't need a large amount of it

Technology

Fast transactions between 3-5 sec transactions, Lumens and XRP are premined.

Team/Personalities

Ripple

Founder Ryan Fugger - a web developer in Vancouver, British Columbia
Chief Strategist Arthur Britto - Bistamp Board Member
Chief Cryptographer David Schwartz - Chef technical officer at WebMaster Incorporated.
Chris Larsen - founder of the lending services companies E-Loan and Prosper

Stellar

Founder Jed McCaleb - ex Ripple member, creator of eDonkey
Board Member Keith Rabois - had executive roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and Square
Board Member Patrick Collison - He is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe.
Board Member Matt Mullenweg - He is best known for developing the free and open source web software WordPress, now managed by The WordPress Foundation

It looks that both have solid teams

Partnership

Ripple has signed with banks as National Australia Bank, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, ReiseBank, Royal Bank of Canada, Santander, SBI Holdings, SBI Remit, Shanghai Huarui Bank and American Express
Stellar has a partnership with IBM and KlickEx to lead the new cross-border payments solution.

As you can see this is the same system targeting other markets.

Happy trading