Stellar's crypto-exchange platform, created on the basis of Ripple to provide financial services to the masses, has already concluded several successful partnership agreements with banking institutions and financial services platforms. After the launch of the Lightyear.io product, the Stellar network has every chance of gaining further recognition in the near future.
The authors of Lightyear.io's development are one of the founders of Stellar (who is also the founder of the MtGox exchange and one of Ripple's co-authors), Jed McCaleb and former Palantir executive director, Brit Yonge. The new startup was conceived with the goal of creating a universal payment network, formed around the open financial protocol Stellar. The payment network will act as a bridge between traditional financial institutions and other payment networks, including crypto-currencies.
Stellar told about the new project in its latest press release. In particular, it is reported that Lightyear.io will function as an extension of Stellar, but it will be more focused on promoting the network through new partnerships, marketing, and activities related to distribution. In other words, despite the fact that Stellar will continue to be a non-commercial open source project, Lightyear.io will operate commercially to further expand the network.
With the introduction of Lightyear.io by 2020, Stellar hopes to receive a share of the payment industry of about 22 trillion dollars.
Jed McCaleb states: "I like working with my longtime friend, Brit Yonj, to launch the Lightyear project, which is a new stage in the development of the Stellar network. Last year, it became obvious that we needed to create a new organization that would support the growing interest of existing and future partners for integration with the Stellar network. With Lightyear, we will create a Stellar fund and expand the ecosystem that provides Internet payments. "
Stellar encourages participation in the project by issuing tokens Lumen (XLM) to members of the Bitcoin community. The program was well received, and now the XLM tokens are in the TOP-10 crypto-currency in terms of market capitalization (similar to Ripple and Stellar, due to the creation of all tokens at the start of the network). With the advent of Lightyear, Stellar will be able to increase the institutional adoption of its financial protocol, which will provide cost-effective transfer operations and other non-banking financial services.