If you still do not know what is Stellar, I want to tell you about this decentralized open source platform connecting people with banks and other payment systems.
Stellar was created with the aim of facilitating cross-border transactions and making them faster, cheaper and safer. If it is true that many cryptocurrencies are born with this goal, today we will retrace what makes Stellar different from the rest.
It is essential to clarify the difference between Stellar and Lumens, because there is much confusion in the ccrypto environment. On the one hand “Stellar” is the name of the project and on the other, “Lumens” are Stellar native cryptocurrencies.
Stellar Project
This decentralized open source protocol called Stellar allows to transfer fiat to cryptocurrencies and vice versa.
The goal is to allow users to operate easily, safely and quickly with international transactions between any pair of coins.
The birth and growth of this protocol is driven by an organization called Stellar Development Foundation, which operates on a non-profit basis.
Unlike the Bitcoin blockchain, Stellar’s blockchain was not designed to be used as a direct means of payment. It seeks instead to be an intermediary in currency conversion.
Many have placed Stellar as a competitor of Ripple (XRP) and it is true that both projects share much of the mission and vision.
How does Stellar work?
The main objective, as we said before, is to facilitate payments, accelerate them and make them safer for users. These payments are issued via “Anchors” which act as a link between any currency and the Stellar network. One of them will change the charge for the credit anchored to the network. As a result of his deposit, a credit will be granted in his wallet which can be sent and received among network participants.
The Stellar network has the advantage of supporting a distributed exchange model. This means that even if a user has a credit in euro, he can send in another currency, for example USD. This is due to the fact that the platform deals with making currency conversion automatically and in addition to the best available rates. These transactions are much faster than those of Bitcoin, as it takes only 5 seconds to verify.
Not only you can change your credit, but you can also withdraw it into FIAT money from partner financial institutions such as banks.
History of Stellar
It is interesting that one of the people responsible for launching this project is Jed McCaleb, founder of one of the largest and most controversial exchanges in the history of cryptocurrencies: Mt. Gox. Jed is also co-founder of Ripple (XRP).
He, along with the lawyer Joyce Kim and Matt Mullenweg (web developer and WordPress creator) created the Stellar project in 2014 and shortly after Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) contributed to the launch of the Stellar Development Foundation.
Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, the platform I’m writing these lines about.
Just in July 2014, Stellar has been officially launched, with an initial investment borne by Stripe for $3 million. In addition, the project pushed an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) that has come to collect about 40 million dollars.
Little by little, exchanges began to list Stellar in its portals and by January 2015 there were already more than 300.000 user accounts registered on the Stella platform it was created.
During May 2017 Stellar launches the commercial arm of the company called Lightyear. A few months later the Stellar Association Scholarship Program, with which more than 2 million Lumens have been assigned to the partners to develop different projects.
The following year, in 2018, Lightyear acquires Chain, Inc. and the merger of these two companies creates Interstellar (No, we’re not talking about the Christopher Nolan movie, but we still advise you to watch it).
Today, Stellar is one of the fastest growing platforms in the blockchain financial world, as well as continually experiencing improvements in the development of the technology that supports it.
What are Lumens?
The monetary unit of Stellar are the Lumens and at this very moment the price of the stellar lumens varies between 0.5 and 0.7 euros.
The crypto currently is listed at number 18 in the market classification of the Coinmarketcap.
Lumen is a cryptocurrency which cannot be mined and during its beginnings the foundation that supports it created 100 billion tokens.
Over the years, these Stellar tokens have been distributed free of charge between:
– 50% for random people.
– 25% for companies and organizations in the crypto ecosystem.
– 20% for Bitcoin or Ripple holders.
The remaining 5% is used to keep the network up and running.
How to get free Lumens?
If you want to obtain the cryptocurrency of the Stellar project for free, you can resort to Stellar Faucets. Faucets guarantee small amounts of cryptocurrencye as compensation for performing tasks within a given website.
Many times these tasks consist of simply visiting the web and click on a link, so here are some Stellar Faucets that you may need:
– Stellarfaucet.info
– EsFaucet
– Althub.club
As always we recommend from our blog, investigate a lot and never provide sensitive information like your security seedto unknown persons.
Stellar Wallets
If you have decided to buy lumens, you will need a place to store them and that place is called wallet. Not any wallet allows you to keep your lumens so we will give you some recommendations of the best wallets to store your lumens.
Among the online wallets you can use blockchain.com o Astral which you can access from the Internet. On the other hand, if you prefer to take your wallet with you, you have the option of Exodus.
As a last recommendation we have a full node wallet that is the Stellar Core, you will have full control of your funds even if it requires a lot of space. You choose which one to use.
Stellar vs. Ripple
Although these platforms compete daily they have key differences that lead them to separate roads.
- While Stellar turns to an audience without a bank, Ripple wants to build partnerships with banks or financial services to create a payment network and move money globally.
- Although Stellar allows anyone to access the platform in a decentralized way, Ripple focuses on banks and large companies.
- Not everything is different, because both have a rather centralized token distribution. The only detail is that while Ripple controls 60% of the outstanding XRP, Stellar controls only 30% of the circulating Lumens.
How to mine Stellar?
Like we told you before, Stellar it is not mineable e non è possibile creare Lumens (XLM) come si può fare neland you can not create Lumens (XLM) as you can do in theBitcoin mining o the Ethereum mining.
The ways to buy Stellars are by buying in an exchange like Bitnovo, operating within the Stellar network, or through the Foundation’s gift programs.
Where to buy Stellar?
If you want to know how to buy Stellar or where to do it, of course we will advise you to buy Stellar on Bitnovo. And that’s not simply because we’re inside the brand blog, but because Bitnovo is really a very simple and fast way to do it.
Our goal as a company is to make a person who has just entered the crypto world able to buy any cryptocurrency in a few minutes, without experiencing the problems that most crypto exchanges have.
If you want to know the step to buy stellar on Bitnovo see our article How to buy Stellar Lumens and have fun carrying them in your wallet.
