What is Stellar is a public, open-source blockchain designed for fast, low-cost payments, asset issuance, and financial applications. Its native cryptocurrency is Stellar (XLM), while the network also supports stablecoins, tokenized funds, payment instruments, and other issued assets.
How Stellar works
Stellar records accounts, balances, trust lines, asset offers, claimable balances, and smart-contract data on a distributed ledger. Transactions can combine payments, asset issuance, decentralized-exchange offers, account authorization, path payments, and multisignature controls. Ledgers generally close every five to seven seconds.
Unlike proof-of-work and proof-of-stake networks, Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol, or SCP. SCP is a federated Byzantine agreement system in which validators select trusted nodes and define quorum slices. Overlapping slices form network quorums, allowing independent validators to agree on transactions without mining or staking XLM as collateral.
This model provides low latency and avoids ongoing block rewards, but its security depends on reliable, independent validators and healthy overlap between quorum configurations. Poorly distributed trust relationships or unavailable important nodes could weaken network resilience.
Soroban is Stellar’s smart-contract platform. Developers write contracts in Rust and compile them to WebAssembly. Soroban operates alongside Stellar’s payment and asset functions, supporting decentralized finance, automated settlement, tokenized assets, and other programmable applications. Protocol 20 introduced Soroban to mainnet, while Protocol 22 and Protocol 23 added contract features, cost reductions, execution improvements, and updated developer tooling.
Primary uses and real-world applications
Stellar is primarily used for cross-border payments, remittances, stablecoin transfers, and settlement between financial institutions. Its built-in decentralized exchange, trust lines, issuer controls, and path payments allow applications to move and exchange assets without creating a separate blockchain for each financial product.
The network also supports fiat-backed tokens and real-world assets. Circle’s USDC, PayPal’s PYUSD, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI tokenized money-market fund, and Ondo Finance’s USDY are among the assets or integrations associated with Stellar. MoneyGram has used Stellar and USDC for digital-asset cash on- and off-ramps, including a stablecoin-powered application in Colombia.
Tokenomics and market data
XLM is used to pay transaction fees, meet minimum account reserves, deter spam, and provide liquidity for payments. Stellar initially created 100 billion lumens and used a 1% annual inflation mechanism. Validators ended that mechanism on 28 October 2019. In November 2019, approximately 55 billion lumens were sent to an account with no signers, making them permanently inaccessible.
The CoinStats snapshot recorded XLM at $0.2257, with a 24h change of +1.81%, market cap of $7.90B (rank #24), and 24h volume of $418.77M. Circulating supply was 35,022,052,456 XLM, while total supply was 50,001,786,840 XLM. The all-time high was $0.8756, with the current price 74.22% below it. XLM is not mined, and the network no longer creates new tokens through annual inflation. The difference between circulating and total supply mainly reflects foundation-held and otherwise restricted allocations.
Who is behind Stellar and where is it based?
Stellar was founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim. The original network launched in July 2014 using modified Ripple node software, but its ledger was new. The current network launched in September 2015 with Stellar Core and SCP, which were developed independently of the original codebase.
David Mazières is Stellar’s chief scientist and a key author of the SCP research. Denelle Dixon has served as chief executive officer and executive director of the Stellar Development Foundation since May 2019. The foundation is a non-stock nonprofit corporation organized under Delaware law in the United States, with operations associated with San Francisco.
Partnerships, advantages, and roadmap
Stellar’s ecosystem includes MoneyGram, Circle, PayPal, Franklin Templeton, Ondo Finance, WisdomTree, Visa, Mastercard, Wirex, and other payment or asset-issuance companies. Its distinctive value is the combination of rapid settlement, low fees, native asset issuance, compliance controls, a built-in exchange, and smart contracts on one public network.
Current development focuses on Soroban execution capacity, parallel processing, lower contract costs, archived-state management, unified Stellar RPC tooling, institutional privacy, stablecoin payments, and tokenized Treasury, private-credit, real-estate, and money-market products. The Stellar Development Foundation reported $55.6 billion in payment volume during 2025 and more than $1 billion in real-world assets onchain.