What is Stellar Lumens (XLM)?
Stellar is a financial platform while Lumen (XLM) is the coin which funds the platform. Stellars mission is to allow users to send, save, and receive money without large fees or hassle. The platform has a not-for-profit structure ensuring they continue to focus on education and giving access to as many people as possible. There were 100 billion Lumens created at genesis. To account for economic growth and lost lumens, they will create new Lumens at the rate of 1% annuals paid weekly.
How will it achieve its mission?
First, they hope to cut costs by decreasing the costs of micro payments. Currently, Deloitte is one of their customers and they have reduced their transaction costs by 40% using the Stellar platform.
Second, they facilitate low-cost payments between different currencies. Tempo is an international money transfer company who uses Stellar and the conducted 600,000 transactions for $0.01 in fees.
Third, is mobile money. They make mobile money platforms interoperable allowing customers to send mobile money to recipients with different providers.
My Thoughts on XLM
Currently XLM is up 14.36% in the last 24h and has a volume of 47.5 million in that same time period. One XLM is currently trading at $0.049945 and it was $0.002443 on 01 Jan 2017. That means if you would have invested $100 into XLM on 01 JAN it would be worth $2,044.41 today.
As I have said in the past I am in crypto currency for the long-term. Is XLM worth investing for the future? Are they the only coin to do what they are trying to do? No, there are coins who have overlapping missions with XLM. Below is a 7day chart for XLM:
My personal view is that they have a good idea, but is it a popular idea? Honestly, it’s too early to tell. I have questions, how fast are they getting new users? How fast are they growing their protocols on their blockchain? I have invested a little bit into XLM because I believe 5 years from now they can have a small piece of the pie in the payment industry and I believe that pie is worth more than $0.04.
However, as always this is not a post to persuade you into investing or not investing into XLM, but rather educate the community on XLM itself and a different insight from one trader. I always recommend doing as much research as possible before investing a coin therefore when the swings are not in your favor you have the fortitude to ride the down wave because you are confident in your investment through your research.
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