Stellar Price

What is Stellar?

Created in 2015, the Stellar network was engineered to offer a digital representation of anything of value and allow for their exchange.

This functionality can be easily compared to Ripple. However, where Ripple tries to connect large financial institutions, Stellar aims to be a payments network for everyone - banks, companies, small businesses, and individuals. Moreover, Stellar isn’t controlled by a single company but instead functions as a decentralized project.

The native cryptocurrency of the Stellar network is known as XLM. The coin, which has experienced a large growth in value serves two important purposes apart from its use as an alternative currency:

• Anti-spam - every Stellar user must deposit a minimum number of XLM on their address for it to become active. This prevents hackers from creating bogus accounts to clog the network.

• Transaction fee payments - Users must burn a small amount of XLM every time they initiate a transaction on the network.

The Stellar network can be used to issue new assets on its protocol, similar to how ERC-20 tokens can be created on the Ethereum blockchain. In addition to this feature, Stellar acts as a decentralized exchange between all the assets that have been created on its network.

How Stellar works

At the time of its release, the Stellar blockchain relied entirely on the same protocol used for the XRP Ledger. As a result, it inherited many of XRP’s features.

For instance, XLM cannot be mined like Bitcoin through a Proof-of-Work consensus. Instead, 100 billion XLM were created at launch and was supposed to increase by 1% on a yearly basis. However, following a community vote in 2019, this programmed inflation was scrapped. Additionally, half of the issued tokens were destroyed, reducing the maximum supply to 50 billion XLM.

The Stellar network is mainly a system for tracking ownership of assets. The base XRP code had a major update in 2015, switching to a unique consensus mechanism called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP).

Essentially, the network tracks two important pieces of information:

• The balance of different tokens of each address.

• What the address plans to do with that balance.

Every 5 seconds, the computers (nodes) that run the Stellar software check the balances and broadcast all necessary changes on the network.

The system is decentralized and anyone can run a node, as long as they meet the hardware requirements. Depending on their usage, nodes can be of 4 different types:

• Watchers - can only submit transactions

• Archivers - can submit transactions and archive them in the ledger

• Basic validators - can submit transactions and participate actively in the consensus.

• Full validators - Same as basic validators, but can also publish the transactions onto the ledger.

Finally, the Stellar Anchors perform an outmost important feature of the network - creating assets. These entities can accept and receive deposits of real-world assets and create their digital representation on the network.

Who invented Stellar?

The creation of Stellar can be credited to Jed McCaleb. The American programmer and entrepreneur is one of the industry’s pioneers. He became famous for founding MtGox in 2010, one of the first successful bitcoin exchanges. He was also one of the founding members of Ripple, where he remained as CTO until 2013.

McCaleb went on to co-found the Stellar Development Foundation with Joyce Kim and created his own payment network, Stellar, where he remains as CTO to this day.

In 2018, his cryptocurrency holdings were estimated at $20 billion, putting him amongst the top 40 richest people in the world.

Stellar price today

Like most cryptocurrencies, XLM is a highly volatile asset. To make an informed decision when purchasing XLM, you need a clear vision of the current Stellar price. For this reason, Paybis offers you this detailed Stellar price chart, where you can check the XLM price in real-time.

In addition to the Stellar price live, you can obtain some key metrics such as the volume traded in the last 24 hours or the highest price the coin has reached during the day.

Finally, by using the drop-down menus above the Stellar chart, you can also:

• Select the exchange from which the data for the price of Stellar is pulled.

• Consult the Stellar price USD or select other FIAT assets.

• Visualize the Stellar price today and compare it to historic price performance by reviewing different timeframes.