Exchange Stellar (XLM)

Stellar is an open-source decentralized protocol for storing and sending digital currencies across the world. It was created with the intention to unite global payment systems in one network to offer the users fast transactions between any digital currency at a low cost. It mainly targets the population of developing countries as they have less access to financial services. Stellar makes the payments crossing borders faster and cheaper than any traditional financial institution.

The Stellar network was created in 2014 by a non-profit Stellar Development Foundation. It was officially launched in 2015. As per the words of the project founder McCaleb, the Stellar network was designed to have all types of forms of value in the parallel run, including fiat and cryptocurrencies. Another goal of Stellar is to allow people to easily transfer crypto into fiat and also to eliminate the friction users usually have when they need to send their money abroad. 

Stellar software runs across a decentralized, open network and handles millions of transactions daily. Even though Stellar also relies on blockchain and Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) in particular to keep everything in sync, it is much faster and more efficient than other big networks like Ethereum or Bitcoin. For the users, it offers a fast, easy, and cheap way to transfer, save, spend, and even loan (by issuing a digital representation of a dollar) the money.

SCP gives a chance to anyone to join the process of achieving the consensus, and at the same time, one user can’t have the majority of the decision-making power. It also provides security from the malefactors and low latency. 

Stellar also offers an open financial infrastructure for developers that anyone can access without any special requirements or permissions. The developers can apply Stellar’s API to build on the network without understanding the particulars of distributed consensus. 

To buy, sell and swap the assets users can use Stellar’s in-built decentralized exchange for crypto, forex, and securities. It offers simple intuitive functionality built into the protocol. 

Stellar is represented by the network of hundreds of independent nodes spread across the globe, each of them certifying and approving the work of the others. The system is completely decentralized, no one can stop the network or adjust the number to his liking, and the ledgers get verified and updated every five minutes.

The main advantage of Stellar is the transaction cost — only 0.00001 of Lumen, which makes it cheap even if the XML token reaches $1. The project team also managed to partner with IBM and launch the World Wire project for the large financial institutions to submit transactions on the Stellar network and transit using stablecoins as bridge tokens.  

The native asset of Stellar is Lumens or XLM tokens — they power the network and fuel the activity on the platform. XLM is needed for the transactions and also for initializing accounts. It has a total supply of 50 billion, with almost 21 billion being in the current circulation.