with a live market cap of $16,336,913,973 USD. It has a circulating supply of 23,061,607,590 XLM coins and a max. supply of 50,001,806,812 XLM coins.
The network’s native token, lumens, serves as a bridge that makes it less expensive to trade assets across borders. All of this aims to challenge existing payment providers, who often charge high fees for a similar service.
If all of this sounds familiar, it is worth noting that Stellar was originally based on the Ripple Labs protocol. The blockchain was created as a result of hard fork, and the code was subsequently rewritten.
In explaining the rationale behind Stellar in September 2020, McCaleb told CoinMarketCap: “The whole original design of Stellar is that you can have fiat currencies and other kinds of forms of value run in parallel with each other and with crypto assets. This is super important to drive this stuff mainstream.”
Few blockchain projects have managed to secure partnerships with big-brand technology companies and fintech firms. A few years ago, Stellar and IBM teamed up to launch World Wire, a project that allowed large financial institutions to submit transactions to the Stellar network and transact using bridge assets such as stablecoins.
Although other blockchains have community funds, meaning that grants can be given to projects that help further the ecosystem, Stellar allows its users to vote on which ventures should be given this support.
This network is secured using the Stellar Consensus Protocol, which is described as having four main properties: “Decentralized control, low latency, flexible trust, and asymptotic security.”
Through SCP, anyone is able to join the process of achieving consensus, and no single entity can end up with the majority of decision-making power. Transactions are also confirmed cheaply and within a few seconds — and safeguards are in place if bad actors attempt to join the network.
