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Introduction
Stellar Lumens (XLM) is intended to be an open-sourced platform that brings together consumers, banks, and payments systems into one network. Ideally, through Stellar Lumens, everyone will have access to a bank and a way to store money. Sort of like the blockchain equivalent of PayPal.
What Is Stellar Lumens & How Does It Work?
The team behind this cryptocurrency wants to make it quick, easy, and cheap to make transactions worldwide, similar to Ripple. In fact, Stellar Lumens is based on a fork of Ripple. It can do this thanks to the power of the decentralized blockchain technology.
Each of Stellar Lumens decentralized servers hold the ledger that keeps track of every single transaction made on the network. To use Stellar, you must upload either debit or credit card funds to the system, then Stellar changes those monies into a virtual currency that exists on the ledger.
This means you can instantly send funds across the world or to your next door neighbor. Cross-border transactions are automatically converted with the lowest possible exchange rate. The recipient only has to withdraw the funds and do what they want with it.
Also, Stellar Lumens allows users to put up orders on a public ledger to purchase or sell other types of currencies. You pre-set the rates for the order, so there are no exchange rate fees for any of the transfers. You can also look at the rest of the global marketplace and compare prices. This marketplace features both cryptocurrencies and real currencies.
It is an ideal technology for those who can’t afford to get a bank account, as transaction fees are incredibly small. Anyone needing to work with micro-payments or small loans can use Stellar Lumens to help them out. Also, with their focus on mobile banking, people can access these services right through their smartphone.
The Tokenomics
The Stellar network is robust. Each time you attempt a transfer, one of the following processes happens:
It converts your funds based on a previous order. Then, the exchange is made automatically.
Lumens, Stellar’s coin, is used for the exchange. The user giving away funds has them transferred into Lumens. The network then converts those Lumens into the recipient’s form of currency. This happens instantly and with almost zero transaction fees.
If for some reason, the transfer between two currencies cannot be made directly, Stellar’s network will automatically convert between multiple currencies until the final one is achieved.
These steps are applied on a case-by-case basis, and only when a user is transferring currencies from one form to another. Of course, all of the final transactions are handled within five seconds. There is no waiting for days for your money to process.
The Roadmap
Stellar Lumens doesn’t actually have an official roadmap on their website. Instead, they make blog posts updating the community on their work and their future goals. The most recent post has the following goals:
SDEX
The team behind Stellar wants to build their own exchange. It is codenamed SDEX, and it will enable automatic searching for the cheapest rates between trading pairs, incredibly low transaction fees, and user control of private keys.
Lightning Network
Stellar plans to incorporate Bitcoin’s “Lightning Network” into their own technology. Unlike Bitcoin, Stellar Lumens is fairly scalable and it is quick. They are only incorporating it to make a good network even better.
For this post, that’s all they have planned. Of course, there are moves to make the network even more scalable and increasing their partner number, as they expect a lot of attention in 2018.
The Team
The Stellar Lumens team is made up of developers and founders of various payment systems like Stripe and PayPal. The project was co-founded Jed McCaleb, who helped create Mt. Gox, the first ever Bitcoin exchange.
This team has some heavy hitters, however. In terms of advisors, they have Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, and Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList.
Community
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stellarorg
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/
Slack: https://slack.stellar.org/
BitcoinTalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1428573.0
The Stellar Lumens team is a little less active than the teams of other cryptocurrencies. They don’t often post on Twitter unless it’s an event or content update, and the subreddit doesn’t see a lot of interaction either. Instead, the team is busy working on their technology and making it better.
Exchanges
Stellar Lumens has been around for a while, and it’s available on popular exchanges like Binance, Kraken, and Bittrex with multiple trading pairs. It will likely stay on these, as other popular exchanges like Coinbase are incredibly selective on the tokens they offer.
Wallets
Stellar is supported by multiple wallets, including Ledger, Stellarport, and Stronghold. They don’t have their own official wallet, but they work well with multiple desktop, mobile, and web wallets.
What’s Next For Them
Stellar Lumens aims to be the banking solution for the general public. Micro-payments and peer-to-peer transactions will work instantly on a global level, with almost no transaction fees. They don’t have much opposition, and the team is already well on their way in establishing this service. With their simple but efficient roadmap in place, the network will only get better, and may even be an emergent token in 2018.
Maxemole 