Stellar Lumens (XLM) is a cryptocurrency of the Stellar project, aiming to bring crypto to financial institutions. Initially, around its launch in 2014, Stellar was focused on bringing finance to the unbanked, but later became geared towards the financial institutions. Stellar was founded by Jed McCaleb, who co-founded Ripple before that, and on the technical level, Stellar was initially just a hard fork of Ripple before getting reworked into a more unique version.

Stellar provides a platform for tokenized versions of the popular fiat currencies, enabling its users to quickly convert fiat into its digital representation on-chain, make transactions, and convert back to fiat. This facilitates fast, cheap, and borderless transactions, which are at the same time backed by traditional money, and are very convenient for both unbanked laymen and financial institutions. At the time of writing, the token basket on Stellar includes US dollars, euros, both Mexican and Argentinian pesos, Brazilian reals, and Nigerian naira. Stellar also has SDK and dev documentation, making it easy for developers to issue their tokens if there is a market for them. Stellar Lumens (XLM) token doesn’t have a privileged role on the Stellar network and is mostly used to power the system.

Stellar boasts its unique consensus protocol, improving on the earlier protocols such as Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. Stellar’s innovation is based on the so-called federated Byzantine agreement, which allows it to have low latency and flexible trust without sacrificing decentralization and security.