What Is Stellar?

Stellar, whose native currency is the lumen (XLM), enables extremely low-cost asset exchange across borders. Founded by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim in 2014, Stellar is the result of a hard fork from Ripple that had occurred a year earlier. McCaleb’s goal had been to facilitate, for all people, the movement of fiat into crypto, in turn making international payments easier and far less expensive (as every transaction costs just 0.00001 XLM, and an XLM costs just a few cents). However, large institutions have been capitalizing off the decentralized platform as well. IBM has teamed up with Stellar to launch World Wire, empowering large financial institutions to transact using bridge assets, such as stablecoin. The Stellar network is secured via the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a federated Byzantive voting system, which is completely decentralized, that halts liveliness until consensus is reached, but enables nodes to reach consensus despite outliers. The average block time for Stellar is near instant, and the maximum supply of lumens is not available. See below for a full selection of markets where you can trade XLM for other cryptocurrencies, US dollars, and other fiat currencies.