About Stellar (XLM/USD)
Stellar is a payments network launched in 2014 by Jed McCaleb, who had earlier co-founded Ripple, alongside Joyce Kim. Its purpose is narrower than most blockchain projects: moving money between currencies and across borders cheaply, quickly and without a chain of correspondent banks taking a cut at each step.
The design follows from that purpose. Stellar does not use proof-of-work or proof-of-stake. It runs the Stellar Consensus Protocol, a form of federated Byzantine agreement in which each participant chooses which others it trusts, and agreement emerges from the overlap between those choices. The result is fast settlement and negligible energy use, at the cost of a trust model that is more explicit and less automatic than mining.
Currencies enter and leave the network through anchors β institutions that hold the real deposit and issue a matching token on the ledger. XLM, the network’s native asset, serves two roles: it is charged in tiny amounts per transaction to make spam expensive, and it can act as a bridge asset when two currencies have no direct market between them. The network is supported by the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit.
What Moves Stellar?
Remittance and payment corridors
Stellar’s case rests on real payment flows. Partnerships with payment providers and the opening of new corridors matter more here than they would for a general-purpose smart contract platform.
Stablecoin issuance on the network
Much of what moves across Stellar is not XLM but tokenised currency. Issuance and redemption activity is a direct measure of whether the network is being used for its stated purpose.
Regulatory treatment of cross-border payments
Because Stellar operates where money transmission is regulated, rules governing stablecoins and remittances affect the institutions that would use it.
Broad crypto direction
Stellar is not insulated from the wider market. The correlations shown on this page are measured from our own daily closes rather than assumed β Stellar and XRP, in particular, share history and are often assumed to move together, which is a claim worth measuring rather than repeating.
Trading Stellar (XLM/USD)
Stellar trades continuously, and the price on this page comes from our own market feed. The chart, the 52-week range and the performance figures are measured from our own daily closes; anything that history cannot support is withheld rather than estimated. Nothing on this page is a recommendation or a forecast β see our methodology.