Stellar price

XLM

#16

The Stellar network is a decentralized, fast, scalable, and uniquely sustainable blockchain built for financial products and services. The network launched in 2014 with the purpose of connecting the world's financial systems by offering a protocol for payment providers and financial institutions that facilitates near-instant global payments and currency exchanges. In 2024, Stellar released protocol 20, enabling full-featured smart contracts to the network. The network is transforming international payments and remittances through safer, faster, and more affordable solutions, and connecting real-world assets to DeFi to enable comprehensive everyday financial services.

The Stellar network’s native digital currency - Lumens (“XLM”) - is used to pay the network’s transaction fees. (XLM can also be used as an intermediate currency for operations. How it works: the protocol converts money in a few seconds, first into XLM, and then into the requested currency.)

Stellar's unique Proof-of-Agreement (PoA) consensus mechanism – the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) – differs from both Proof of Stake and Proof of Work. SCP is designed to secure the network through reputation rather than through computing resources or staked crypto tokens. All Stellar validators are required to have a publicly-accessible and verifiable record identifying themselves, building trust within the network. By design, Stellar does not provide onchain financial incentives to run validators, nor does it rely on stake or hash power to secure the network. Instead organizations run nodes for network benefit and collaborate to reach a network-wide agreement about the validity of transactions.

Stellar is a proven platform for asset issuance; many well-known institutions select Stellar as their preferred network for bringing real-world assets (RWAs) onchain. The network's speed and low fees, robust asset issuance framework, compliance tools, and anchor network provide financial institutions the infrastructure needed to tokenize assets while maintaining regulatory compliance. This approach has attracted significant RWA volume, with hundreds of millions of dollars in stablecoins, tokenized funds, and other real-world assets flowing through the network daily. It has also led to groundbreaking implementations like Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund, the first U.S. registered money market fund on a public blockchain.

Stellar's smart contract platform extends the network's capabilities to support sophisticated financial applications while maintaining Stellar's core principles of efficiency and accessibility. Built with Rust and WebAssembly, Soroban prioritizes performance through features like deterministic concurrency and multi-dimensional fees, enabling complex operations with predictable costs and sub-five-second finality. Security is foundational, with Rust's memory safety guarantees, no-reentrancy design, and an authorization-required framework that makes it difficult to introduce vulnerabilities. Unlike general-purpose platforms, Soroban is purpose-built for financial applications, supporting everything from decentralized exchanges and lending protocols to tokenized assets. This aligns with Stellar's purpose to connect traditional finance with blockchain technology, providing developers the tools to build real-world everyday financial services that are scalable, secure, and accessible to users worldwide.

No, XLM and XRP are different cryptocurrencies built on different networks. XLM (Stellar Lumens) is the native cryptocurrency of the Stellar network, it's a separate project with different founding principles, technology, and governance than Ripple/XRP.

The network maintains a very high level of security. Unlike other Proof-of-Stake mechanisms, network validators are not financially incentivized to process transactions. The Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) is also resilient to attacks by allowing nodes to agree on something safely and preventing double-spend attacks, which is a construction of the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). FBA differs from other well-known consensus mechanisms like Proof of Work (which relies on a node’s computational power) and Proof of Stake (which relies on a node’s staking power) by instead relying on the agreement of trusted nodes. Additionally, XLM holders must have at least one token in order to remain active on the network. This nuance performs a global goal - the execution of network transactions efficiently and with minimal time costs. Plus, Lumens offers protection against flood attacks by making microtransactions too expensive for hackers with no chance of profit, which keeps Stellar network safer from malicious attacks on the network.

Security is also a key pillar of the network's smart contract platform. Soroban's approach to security starts with its foundation in Rust, a language endorsed by cybersecurity experts. It has strong memory safety guarantees – eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities – and extensive tooling and compiler checks to catch potential issues early in development. The platform strategically disallows reentrancy, preventing a common attack vector responsible for some of blockchain's largest hacks while implementing an authorization-required framework that replaces traditional blanket permissions with specific, limited authorizations. This granular approach significantly reduces the attack surface, protecting users from potential exploits while requiring minimal code implementation—making Soroban secure by design.

Jed McCaleb founded Stellar with the lawyer Joyce Kim after leaving Ripple in 2013 over disagreements about the company’s future direction.

In explaining the rationale behind Stellar in September 2020, McCaleb told CoinMarketCap: “The whole original design of Stellar is that you can have fiat currencies and other kinds of forms of value run in parallel with each other and with crypto assets. This is super important to drive this stuff mainstream.”

McCaleb’s goal is to ensure that Stellar can give people a way of moving their fiat into crypto — and eliminate the friction that people normally experience when they are sending money around the world.

He currently serves as the CTO of Stellar, as well as the co-founder of the Stellar Development Foundation. This not-for-profit organization aims to “unlock the world’s economic potential by making money more fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered.”

• Ultra fast low-cost blockchain optimized for scalable payment solutions
• A global ramp network that connects digital assets to regulated financial institutions and existing payment rails
• Enterprise grade security and features optimized for RWA tokenization
• A smart contract platform to build scalable DeFi applications

Stellar distinguishes itself from other blockchain networks through several key features designed for everyday financial use. At its core, Stellar offers exceptional transaction speed and efficiency, with confirmation times below 6 seconds and transaction costs of 0.00001 XLM (fractions of a penny). Making it the cheapest network to send payments at scale - and considerably more cost-effective than traditional financial services.

Stellar bridges traditional finance and digital assets through the industry’s most extensive on and off-ramp infrastructure (also known as the Anchor Network). Early on, SDF recognized mainstream adoption will require seamless movement between physical cash and crypto assets. This insight led to the development of the Stellar Anchor Network, an unmatched system of over 450,000 cash-to-crypto ramp locations worldwide that connects blockchain technology with existing banking systems and payment rails. This vast network—spanning 180+ countries—creates a critical infrastructure layer that traditional financial institutions can leverage to offer blockchain-based services on a single, seamless platform. By focusing on this fundamental requirement for mass adoption, Stellar is at the intersection of traditional and digital finance, enabling users globally to access blockchain-based financial services regardless of their banking status or technical expertise.

The network's consensus mechanism differs significantly from energy-intensive and financial driven consensus mechanisms. Stellar uses a Federated Byzantine Agreement or Proof-of-Agreement (PoA) approach where each node selects trustworthy validators rather than requiring the entire network to validate transactions. This design not only increases speed but dramatically reduces energy consumption compared to proof-of-work systems.

Strategic partnerships with companies like Moneygram International, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, PayPal and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have made Stellar the go-to network for global real-world adoption for everyday financial services.

Strong Anchor Ecosystem and Real-World Integration Stellar's anchor system provides crucial bridges between the blockchain and traditional financial systems. Anchors are regulated financial institutions that issue tokens backed by real-world assets and handle the on/off ramps for fiat currencies. This established infrastructure means that tokenized assets on Stellar can easily connect to existing banking rails and payment systems. The global Stellar anchor directory showcases numerous institutions already providing these services, creating a ready-made ecosystem for new tokenization projects. This integration with traditional finance, combined with Stellar's technical capabilities, makes it an ideal platform for projects looking to tokenize real-world assets while maintaining regulatory compliance and operational efficiency.

Find out more about XRP, the cryptocurrency XLM forked from

Read the Crypto Titans interview with Stellar’s Jed McCaleb

CMC Alexandria: The best educational resource for crypto

Plenty more interviews on the CoinMarketCap Blog

Stellar's Bell Upgrade Goes Live on Testnet Ahead of Nov. 23 Mainnet Vote

Curve Finance Launches on Stellar, Its First Non-EVM Chain

Janus Henderson and Centrifuge Launch Tokenized Nasdaq-100 Fund on Stellar

XLM Price Prediction - What could affect XLM’s future price?

What is Stellar (XLM)?

Latest Stellar (XLM) Price Analysis

Stellar (XLM) Price Prediction

Latest Stellar (XLM) News Update