Stellar Network (XLM) created in 2014 and is an open-source financial system and community-owned blockchain network. Stellar aids cross-asset transfers of value in a fraction of price. It is operated by the Stellar Development Foundation, a nonprofit organisation that received initial funding from Stripe's payments startup. Additionally, it received donations from BlackRock, Google and FastForward. Stellar Network became the first to obtain a Shariah-compliance certificate for payments and asset tokenisation and was selected as a partner by IBM for a double-pegged stablecoin project.
Stellar is a cryptocurrency meaning it was developed for trading on decentralised networks called blockchains. This technology ensures that the coins cannot be counterfeited like regular currencies and prevent them from being double-spent. Digital currencies are not issued by central banks, and governments do not interfere in their trading activities. The Stellar Foundation had over 100M lumens in existence but burned roughly half of its outstanding coins in November 2019.
Both digital currencies use almost the same blockchain code, neither allows mining, use a distributed ledger and provide nearly free and instantaneous transactions. These similarities occur because the founder of both platforms, McCaleb, recognised what worked with Ripple and brought it back to create Stellar.
In 2018, Stellar signed a deal with TransferTo fοr cross-border payments tο more than 70 natiοns. The Stellar Development Foundation is the official sponsor for SXSW's Finance 3.0 Summit as it announced in January 2022. Additionally, the same month, Tascombank, the oldest commercial bank in Ukraine, announced that is launching a Stellar-based pilot for Ukraine's national fiat currency, the hryvnia.
