A brief history of Stellar
In 2014, the Ripple developers, under pressure from the crypto community, decided to publish the XPR source code, which resulted in the StellarCoin hard fork. A year later, the creator of the hard fork Jed McCaleb, a former CTO of Ripple, switched Stellar to its own blockchain. This was necessary since XRP was attacked all the time by the user for centralization.
Today Stellar is a publicly available decentralized marketplace with various assets in circulation. The platform also has its own open source cryptocurrency Stellar Lumens (XLM).
The currency is based on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), which is similar in principle to the BFT protocol of the Ripple platform, but has a significant difference — all network validators are equivalent, there are no central control nodes in the blockchain. But in the event of suspicious activity, the entire Stellar network is frozen and transactions become impossible. Because of this, XLM is more decentralized than Ripple, but less decentralized than Proof-Of-Work cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum).
Stellar features
- Stellar allows you to carry out multi-currency transactions. For this, an anchor system is used. She accepts any money for a deposit and issues a loan in the currency that you require. For example, you send Monero, and the recipient receives Bitcoin or any other currency is needed. The system independently selects a profitable course.
- The system is overseen by the independent Stellar Development Foundation.
- XLM is open source, so everyone can take part in the platform modernization.
Disadvantages of Stellar
- If you suspect a hacker attack, the system may freeze. Fortunately, this rarely happens. The last system freeze was noticed in May 2019.
- Stellar's annual inflation rate is 1%.
Getting started with XLM
To get started with a wallet for storing and transferring XLM, you need to send at least 1 XLM to it. As soon as the transfer arrives at your wallet, it will become active. This is done to protect against spam.
To store this currency, you can pay attention to the special wallets Solar wallet and Lobstr.
Stellar Lumens network speed and fees
XLM is considered to be a fast blockchain. The transaction is confirmed in a few seconds. You need 1 confirmation of the XLM blockchain for the exchange. The fee is very small, on average 0.00001 XLM.
