Basics
Stellar connects banks, payments systems with the aim of moving money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.
Through Stellar users can send fund across the world without any significant fees or delays (2-5 seconds). Usage wise the project is being aimed at both individual users as well as businesses.
Stellar can be considered a decentralised Ripple - they are similar but Stellar is not controlled like Ripple is.
Team is based in USA with the offices in San Francisco and New York.
Tokens and usage
Features of the platform include:
Remittances - Send money across borders quickly, for a fraction of a cent.
Micropayments - increase efficiency and decrease the cost of smaller transfers.
Mobile Branches - allowing the usage of mobile branches to expand retail operation
Mobile Money - customers can send money to recipients with different providers
Services for underbanked - low-cost accounts, loans, and microsavings for people struggling to get normal bank accounts
XLM is a native asset that built into the network and is needed for small transaction fees, to create accounts and as bridge between currencies.
Recent News
Recently Stellar has received a certificate of Sharia compliance, one which will allow the coin to be used by Muslim population
Stellar has been mentioned as one of the assets considered for Coinbase listing - very significant development.
IBM confirmed the increased adoption of Stellar by confirming that a couple of the largest banks” are adopting Stellar.
To help with the adoption IBM is exploring cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar. Crypto dollar running on the Stellar blockchain network. The stablecoin is called Stronghold USD.
Stellar Decentralised Exchange is live and running
Roadmap
The roadmap highlights major developments for 2018:
The decentralised exchange has ongoing developments to finish the feature list.
There is further support for ecosystem planned In 2018: better overall brand communication, more help guides, better technical documentation, including release notes and continued improvement to our Horizon API and the surrounding SDKs
Another major development would be lightning network which will have a huge positive effect on Stellar’s long-term scalability and security.
Availability and price
XLM is listed on several exchanges with major ones being:
Binance (46% of volume)
Upbit (16% of volume)
Poloniex (7% of volume)
also on BCEX, Bittrex, Kraken, CoinEgg, OKEx, HitBTC and many more
Current price as of 26th of June is around$0.33 with XLM being ranked on 6th place in terms of the market capitalisation and market cap of $6.2B
Around 19B out of 104B of the tokens is in the circulation. So there will be plenty of tokens introduced in the future.
Price graph
Stellar experienced some significant price swings with incredible price increase during December/January, April and recent increase due to announcements. Overall one of the strongest altcoins during bear market. The ATH is $0.93 and was achieved on 4th of January
How is it doing?
Stellar has been very impressive recently and increased in price due to different announcements and developments.
Ripple (XRP) is it's main competition and Ripple is worth 3x as much as Stellar. I personally like Stellar more and find the valuation difference unjustified.
On the other hard it's already valued at 6B and while IBM and bank partnerships are huge it's already very high market cap.
The future looks good though (lightning network, upcoming projects built on top of it) and it seems a decent 'safe' choice next to the likes of ETH, IOTA, NEO or Vechain.
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