Stellar is a cryptocurrency on the blockchain that transfers value, including money. Its native currency is Lumens which are at the time of this article worth a mere $0.259441. Here’s why its relevant or should be.

Stellar(XLM) established Jed McCaleb in 2014. This was after he left Ripple– another cryptocurrency company with many similarities. Jed left because he didn’t agree with some of Ripple’s ideas. Stellar claims to have fixed a large amount of problems that Ripple. It serves a lower-income group of people: “Stellar connects people to low-cost financial services to fight poverty and develop individual potential.” Straight from their website here. Stellar is the “first provably safe consensus mechanism that simultaneously enjoys four key properties: decentralized control, low latency, flexible trust, and asymptotic security.”

 

Decentralized Control, Trust, Security

Decentralized control. It is popular among cryptocurrency companies. Not one person controls it all- it is a community. One in which people may not force you into an costly monopoly as banks have been doing for a hundreds of years. Using Stellar “any entity can run a server. The network becomes more robust with more servers.” Entities, like people and companies, sync with the ledger and check to see if the transaction was legit. No one can get away with stealing money unless they hack the entire system of innumerable entities on it. This is because of the ledger that keeps track of the payments and checked the entities on the ledger. Learn more about it here in this video I made encompassing the topic blockchain in general. Continuing, a whole community of normal people can be responsible for supporting itself. And still with little cost and no primary control. That is the power of decentralization and why it is significant in in everything we can use it for- beyond money.

 

Low Latency

This specific topic is a significant one as you will soon see- how fast it can make transactions. Bitcoin completes 1 transaction in an hour. Ethereum is slowing down as it gets bigger. According to Eugene Lukyanov, a man who studied Blockchain “by approximately November 2018… it’s going to be economically not viable to mine Ether using PoW consensus.” (it used to be 15 seconds but more people started using it). As you can see, many cryptocurrencies have slow times, getting slow as it is getting used more. That’s where Stellar is strong- the transactions times are 2–5 seconds. This can change a lot if it maintains its current pace. Faster times means getting money faster, giving money faster, and less patience. If you are looking for wait times to decrease this cryptocurrency is a great candidate. Finally, the cost of transaction is fractions of a penny.

Stellar is a great cryptocurrency and with “decentralized control, low latency, flexible trust, and asymptotic security” it might be a great choice for whatever you are doing with it.

 

Sources and Read More
https://www.investinblockchain.com/stellar-lumens-vs-ripple/
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/
https://www.stellar.org/