The valuation of Stellar has appreciated by 100 times in last one year.
What is Stellar in their own words
"Stellar is a platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost."
Key Features of Stellar
- Stellar is based on a consensus algorithm rather than mining. This means transactions confirm in a few seconds.
- The supply of lumen increases at a fixed rate of 1% a year.
- Stellar aims to let you transact in your currency of choice (fiat or digital).
So this is more in competition with BTC, XRP, BCash, LTC kind of assets who helps to do financial x-border transactions. Their apeal is they do it fast and do it cheaper.
It does not compete with ETH, EOS, NEO, ADA, NAS etc on which one can launch their tokens.
How do they compare themselves with top 10 crypto assets
They achieve it through the implementation of lightening system originally proposed and still under discussion for Bitcoin.
Their product is live and is already used by large number of orgalizations listed here
Looking at their 2018 plans - Their product will become much improved by the end of 2018.
Below are all the available wallets on which you can store your XLMs
And the most important thing I always look at for any project is at its network activity. Their dashboard page is pretty neat. Below is a snap of the same.
Their consensus protocol is based on federated Byzantine agreement (FBA). FBA brings open membership and decentralized control to Byzantine agreement. Anyone can join. FBA determines quorums, or groups of nodes sufficient to reach agreement, in a distributed way. Each node decides which others to trust. Different nodes don’t need to rely on the same combination of trusted participants to reach consensus.
In principal it is still a centralized consensus protocol. And so not as safe as of Bitcoin POW.