Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies.[2] The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delawarenonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.[3][4]
History
In 2014, Jed McCaleb, founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple, launched the network system Stellar with former lawyer Joyce Kim. Before the official launch, McCaleb formed a website called "Secret Bitcoin Project" seeking alpha testers.[5] The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was created in collaboration with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the project officially launched that July. Stellar received $3 million in seed funding from Stripe.[6][7] Stellar was released as a decentralized payment network and protocol with a native currency, stellar. At its launch, the network had 100 billion stellars. 25 percent of those would be given to other non-profits working toward financial inclusion.[8][9] Stripe received 2 percent or 2 billion of the initial stellar in return for its seed investment.[10] The cryptocurrency, originally known as stellar, was later called Lumens or XLM.[11] In August 2014, Mercado Bitcoin, the first Brazilian bitcoin exchange, announced it would be using the Stellar network.[12] By January 2015, Stellar had approximately 3 million registered user accounts on its platform and its market cap was almost $15 million.[13]
The Stellar Development Foundation released an upgraded protocol with a new consensus algorithm in April 2015 which went live in November 2015.[14] The new algorithm used SCP, a cryptocurrency protocol created by Stanford professor David Mazières.[15]
Lightyear.io, a for-profit entity of Stellar, was launched in May 2017 as the commercial arm of the company.[16] In September 2017, Stellar announced a benefits program, part of its Stellar Partnership Grant Program, which would award partners up to $2 million worth of Lumens for project development. In September 2018, Lightyear Corporation acquired Chain, Inc and the combined company was named Interstellar.[17]
In 2021, Franklin Templeton launched the first “tokenised” US mutual fund using Stellar.[18]
Usage
In 2015, it was announced that Stellar was releasing an integration into Vumi, the open-sourced messaging platform of the Praekelt Foundation in South Africa.[19] Vumi uses cellphone talk time as currency using the Stellar protocol.[20] Stellar partnered with cloud-based banking software company Oradian in April 2015 to integrate Stellar into Oradian's banking platform to add microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Nigeria.[21][22]
Deloitte announced its integration with Stellar in 2016 to build a cross-border payments application, Deloitte Digital Bank.[23] In December 2016, it was announced that Stellar's payment network had expanded to include Coins.ph, a mobile payments startup in the Philippines, ICICI Bank in India, African mobile payments firm Flutterwave, and French remittances company Tempo Money Transfer.[24]
In October 2017, Stellar partnered with IBM and KlickEx to facilitate cross-border transactions in the South Pacific region. The cross-border payment system developed by IBM includes partnerships with banks in the area.[25][26] The Lumens digital currency was ranked 13th in market capitalization at the time of the IBM partnership.[27]
In December 2017, TechCrunch announced Stellar's partnership with SureRemit, a Nigerian-based non-cash remittances platform.[28]
On January 6, 2021, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine announced cooperation and partnership with Stellar in development of Ukraine digital infrastructure, after which Stellar value increased by 40%.[29]
Ecosystem
Stellar has an active community ecosystem and supports projects that utilize the Stellar Network with the Stellar Community Fund.[30]
Overview
Stellar is an open-source protocol for exchanging money or tokens using the Stellar Consensus Protocol.[1] The platform's source code is hosted on GitHub.
Servers run a software implementation of the protocol, and use the Internet to connect to and communicate with other Stellar servers. Each server stores a ledger of all the accounts in the network. 3 nodes are operated by the Stellar Development Foundation, in conjunction with 21 other organizations, providing for a total of 66 validator nodes.[31] Transactions among accounts occur not through mining but rather through a consensus process among accounts in a quorum slice.[32] The current network fee is 100 stroops, equivalent to 0.00001 XLM.[33]
