Buy Stellar

Stellar was started in 2014 by one of the founders of Ripple and operates in a very similar fashion to Ripple itself.

However, where Ripple is a product of Ripple Labs, a private company, aimed at the traditional banking system, Stellar is overseen by the not-for-profit Stellar Development Foundation and is designed to be an open and freely accessible system for transacting and exchanging both fiat and digital currencies by everyday people all over the world. (Stellar is often linked to the crypto drive to ‘bank the unbanked’).

Like Ripple, Stellar relies on a global network of trust nodes to continually check and re-check transactions on the ledger to ensure their accuracy. The Stellar network can process tens of thousands of transactions per second and uses less energy per transaction than Visa.

The native token of the Stellar network is the lumen (XLM). Lumens are used to cover the network’s minimal transaction fees and can also be used to provide extra liquidity if required to reconcile differences between two currency pools.