Since the start of this, the greatest Bitcoin bull run in history, there have been some massive gains in the Altcoin market. Perhaps one of the strongest performers has been Stellar Lumens.
The driving force behind the XLM rally is widespread adoption as a blockchain and BitBoy Crypto is here to tell us about it.
Stellar is an open source, decentralised protocol for digital currency to fiat money transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies.
In 2014, Jed McCaleb, founder of Mt. Gox [former Bitcoin exchange] and co-founder of Ripple, launched the network system Stellar with former lawyer Joyce Kim.
The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was created in collaboration with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the project officially launched that July. Stellar received $3 million in seed funding from Stripe. The cryptocurrency, originally known as Stellar, was later called Lumens or XLM.
Because McCaleb has worked on Ripple, Stellar was created as a hardfork of Ripple itself, like Ripple, it was designed to be a payment network that will allow international transactions between any currencies but unlike Ripple, banks are not the primary target. It is specifically designed to help the world’s unbanked have access to financial services.
In 2016 article that McCaleb wrote for Bitcoin magazine Why Stellar? “After years of working in the fintech space, I realised that the world financial infrastructure is fundamentally broken, leaving billions without resources. Since anyone can participate in the network, it can be particularly helpful for the 2 billion unbanked people worldwide.”
Through revolutionary technology Stellar Payment network attracted the attention of some major players in tech and finance world in which includes Coins.ph, a mobile payments startup in the Philippines, ICICI Bank in India, French remittances company Tempo Money Transfer which operates in 190,000 locations in 120 countries and African mobile payments firm Flutterwave.
Deloitte, one of the Big Four accounting organisations and the largest professional services network in the world lowered transaction cost by 40% after its integration with Stellar in 2016 to build a cross-border payments application, Deloitte Digital Bank.
In October 2017, Stellar partnered with IBM and KlickEx, a Polynesian payments system for low value electronic foreign exchange transactions using an interbank smart market retail system to facilitate cross-border transactions in the South Pacific region. The cross-border payment system developed by IBM includes partnerships with banks in the area.
Germany’s Bankhaus von der Heydt (BVDH) one of the world oldest banks partnered with tokenisation and digital asset custody technology provider Bitbond for the first direct issuance of a stablecoin EURB by a banking institution on Stellar and the first of its kind in the crypto market from Europe.
Stellar announced the audition of USD Coin(USDC) which is expected to go live by February 2021. USDC is a stablecoin developed by the Centre Consortium, a collaboration between Circle Internet Financial (Circle) and Coinbase. USDC is the second largest stable coin with a market cap of $5.45B and 12th largest crypto by market cap overall.
On January 6, 2021, Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine announced cooperation and partnership with Stellar in development of Ukraine digital infrastructure after which Stellar value increased by 40%.
All of these huge news for Stellar could not come at a better time as their biggest competitor and the hardfork that it originated from Ripple is under heavy fire. Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Ripple for allegedly violating investor-protection laws by selling the XRP digital asset, a security the regulator considers as unlicensed.
According to the complaint, Ripple engaged in an illegal securities offering from 2013 to the present and since XRP acts as “investment contract”, the company has to comply under the federal securities laws.
As a result, multiple exchanges have announced the suspension of trading and delisting of XRP including Coinbase, Crypto.com, Binance US and Bittrex while XRP has dropped from 73 cent to 17 cent in less than a month as a result.
The future of XRP is very uncertain depending on the outcome of the SEC lawsuit, it may spell the end of XRP. With XLM being the best and close competitors off XRP, this might be the best thing that could happen to Stellar.
BitBoy believes the future of Stellar is so bright in fact it that it price might be strongly impacted by XRP market share might be able to take. He believes XLM has the potential to go up 25x from its current price around 25 cent.