Stellar

Stellar is a blockchain-based payment network whose leaders see it as a faster and cheaper way to make global payments than large remittance companies. Moreover, Stellar serves as a decentralized exchange and marketplace, with a built-in order book that tracks ownership of Stellar assets. 

Stellar Lumens (XLM) is the native cryptocurrency of Stellar. XLM acts as an intermediate currency for operations and is also used to pay transaction fees.

Jed McCaleb founded Stellar with Joyce Kim in 2014 by forming a new blockchain that split off from Ripple’s blockchain (of which he co-founded). McCaleb said: “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.”

MCaleb currently serves as the CTO of Stellar, as well as the co-founder of the Stellar Development Foundation. This not-for-profit organization aims to “unlock the world’s economic potential by making money more fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered.”

Stellar initially launched on July 31, 2014 with the network officially launching in 2015.

Stellar deploys the “Stellar Consensus Protocol” (SCP) which has been described as having four main properties: “Decentralized control, low latency, flexible trust, and asymptotic security.” 

Under SCP, a set group of “trustworthy” nodes are responsible for validating transactions and blocks. This set of trustworthy nodes is voted on periodically and the winners are responsible for validating transactions.