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<h2 id="how-stellar-reaches-agreement-without-mining-or-staking">How Stellar Reaches Agreement Without Mining or Staking</h2>
<p><a href="https://stellar.org" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">@StellarOrg</a> runs its native asset on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), first introduced in 2015 by David Mazières (<a href="https://x.com/dmazieres" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">@dmazieres</a>). <a href="https://cns.ucsd.edu/events/event/the-stellar-consensus-protocol-a-federated-model-for-internet-level-consensus/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Mazières is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and serves as Chief Scientist at the Stellar Development Foundation.</a></p>
<p>Unlike proof-of-work or proof-of-stake networks, Stellar has no miners or stakers. Instead, <a href="https://stellar.org/blog/foundation-news/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">SCP is built on federated Byzantine agreement (FBA), a model that gives each participant individual control over whom to trust.</a> Each validator publishes a list of other nodes it relies on and sets a threshold for how many of them must agree before a decision is accepted. Any group that clears that threshold is called a quorum slice.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/interstellar/understanding-the-stellar-consensus-protocol-423409aad32e" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">SCP allows decentralized, leaderless networks to reach a consensus outcome efficiently</a>, with overlapping trust lists binding the network together in a way that resembles how internet service providers peer with one another. As long as those trust lists share sufficient overlap, the network reaches agreement safely.</p>
<h2 id="when-the-system-stops-rather-than-splits">When the System Stops Rather Than Splits</h2>
<p>The protocol is designed with a deliberate trade-off: if trust lists fail to overlap enough, the network halts rather than risks producing conflicting transaction histories. That design was tested in practice on May 15, 2019. <a href="https://stellar.org/blog/developers/may-15th-network-halt" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">At 1:14 p.m. Pacific time, the Stellar network halted for 67 minutes due to an inability to reach consensus. During that time no ledgers were closed and no transactions were processed.</a></p>
<p><a href="https://stellar.org/blog/developers/may-15th-network-halt" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">The ledger state remained safe and consistent across the network, and no one lost their funds.</a> The Stellar Development Foundation explained in its post-mortem that <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/stellars-blockchain-briefly-goes-offline-confirming-the-project-lacks-decentralization" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">"some new nodes took on too much consensus responsibility too soon,"</a> disrupting the quorum overlap the network depended on.</p>
<p><a href="https://stellar.org/blog/developers/may-15th-network-halt" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">The SDF noted that the halt was not a failure of the consensus protocol itself, but rather that a temporary halt is preferable to the permanent confusion of a fork.</a> The incident highlighted both the resilience of SCP's safety guarantees and the operational discipline required to expand a federated validator set responsibly.</p>
<p><strong>Sources:</strong><br><a href="https://stellar.org/blog/developers/may-15th-network-halt" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Stellar Development Foundation: May 15th Network Halt (Official Post-Mortem)</a><br><a href="https://stellar.org/blog/foundation-news/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Stellar Development Foundation: Stellar Consensus Protocol Whitepaper Announcement</a><br><a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/stellars-blockchain-briefly-goes-offline-confirming-the-project-lacks-decentralization" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">CoinTelegraph: Stellar's Blockchain Briefly Goes Offline (May 2019)</a></p>

Stellar has no miners or stakers, so each validator picks whom it trusts

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