Stellar

The Stellar Lumens project was developed in 2014 amid widespread criticism of Ripple cryptocurrency. Many users and analysts blamed the developers of this cryptocurrency for a centralized approach to development. As a result, the idea came up to create a fork with the same principles, but with an emphasis on the decentralization of the system.

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The main purpose of cryptocurrency is internal functionality, system support payments and investments. Therefore, to assess the potential and development prospects, attention is to be paid not to digital currency itself, but to the Stellar Lumens platform. The original name is Stellar, later changed to Lumens. The developers do not set as their goal just making their own digital currency a full-fledged means of payment or intermediary virtual currency for exchange.

The Stellar platform was founded by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim as a fork of Ripple (XRP) in 2014. At first it worked on the protocol of Ripple, but then in 2015 an original Stellar protocol with open source code was created, and the units of the crypto currency were named stellar, though now they are often also called lumens.

Why did Stellar project founders decide to separate from a very promising platform? The reason is Ripple is still being harshly criticized by many experts for being a completely centralized platform controlled by Ripple Labs company; Ripple’s code has been closed for a long time. Stellar was meant to be “a killer” platform by giving the same benefits as Ripple avoiding its flaws.

Stellar is a fairly fast and scalable open source platform that already supports up to several thousand transactions per second; transaction confirmation time does not exceed 2-5 seconds. The platform can transfer various currencies, crypto-currencies, tokens and so on. To confirm transactions, SCP protocol is used instead of the usual Proof-of-Work. The platform allows you to use both multi-signature and smart contracts. A total of about 100 billion coins have been created, and a fixed annual inflation of 1% is also present.

Stellar makes it possible to create, send, and trade digital representations of all forms of money: dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything. It’s designed so all the world’s financial systems can work together on a single network.

All coins are issued initially, so this crypto currency is not mineable. Most of the issued coins belong to the non-profit organization Stellar.org, which provides support and development for the Stellar network. The main mission of this organization was the fight against poverty, creating every inhabitant of the world access to open and low-cost financial instruments, cheap loans and reliable savings accounts.