Stellar is an open-source network for currencies and payments. Stellar makes it possible to create, send and trade digital representations of all forms of money—dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything. It's designed so all the world's financial systems can work together on a single network.
The basic operation of Stellar is similar to that of most decentralized payment technologies. It runs a network of decentralized servers with a distributed ledger that is updated across all nodes every 2 to 5 seconds. 2 The consensus protocol is the most noticeable difference between Stellar and bitcoin.
** The History of Stellar**
The Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Jed McCaleb, runs Stellar. The Stellar project was initially funded by the payments startup Stripe, as well as donations from organizations such as BlackRock, Google, and FastForward. The organization's operational costs are covered by tax-deductible public donations.
Stellar signed a deal with TransferTo in 2018 for cross-border payments to over 70 countries.
It was also the first distributed technology ledger to receive a Shariah-compliant certificate for payments and asset tokenization, and IBM (IBM) chose it as a partner for a double-pegged stablecoin project.
Stellar Cryptocurrency
Stellar’s cryptocurrency is called lumen (XLM). With a maximum supply of 50 billion coins, there are approximately 22.5 billion coins in circulation.
The Stellar Foundation originally had over 100 billion lumens in circulation, but in November 2019, it burned roughly half of its remaining coins.
The move caused a short-term increase in the price of XLM, but the rally was short-lived. Coin burns are contentious because they imply the type of manipulation that decentralized systems are meant to prevent.
