No.017
Stellar XLM
βLumen,β the courier of light who took the back roads while Ripple took the banks
π Ripple's runaway sibling: no mining, just the nod of consensus, carrying money to people the banks forgot
π¬ βMy brother chases the big banks. Me? I want the kid with no bank at all to be able to send her grandmother fifty cents without losing forty of it on the way. Same blood, different errand. β¨β
- Stellar (XLM) is Ripple's little sibling: same founder, very different aim. Where Ripple courts banks, Stellar wants to reach people who have no bank at all.
- The coin is the Lumen. No mining anywhere, trusted validators simply agree, so transfers settle in seconds and barely sip electricity.
- Born 2014. In one famous night in 2019 it set fire to half its own supply.
π The Story
Two coins, one father. Jed McCaleb helped build Ripple, the river that carries money between banks. Then he walked away from it. The question that pulled him out the door was small and stubborn: what about everyone the banks never bother with? On 31 July 2014 he launched something of his own, and the payment company Stripe handed him three million dollars to get it moving. He called it Stellar. Its coin is the Lumen.
So the family split into two errands. Ripple knocks on the marble doors of finance. Stellar takes the back roads, the remittance from a worker in one country to a child in another, the kind of transfer that used to crawl through banks for days and arrive with chunks bitten out of it. And Stellar refused the pickaxe entirely. No mining, no humming server farms. Instead, validators who already trust one another check the books and nod together. That nod is the whole engine. It's called the Stellar Consensus Protocol, and it confirms a payment before you've finished reading this sentence.
The siblings still elbow each other in the same arena, both selling fast money across borders. Stellar's loudest move came in November 2019, at its own Meridian conference: the foundation announced it was holding far too many Lumens and burned roughly 55 billion of them, cutting the total supply almost in half. The price jumped about 25 percent on the news. A coin that walks lightly, deciding it should carry less.
π Stats
𧩠How it works
An uncle in Kenya sends money to his niece in the Philippines. The old way, it crawled through banks and took days. But on Stellar, the money is briefly swapped into Lumens (XLM) to cross like a βbridge,β then swapped back into local currency on the receiving end. The trusted on-ramps that help with this exchange and transfer are called βanchors.β And every one of those transactions is settled, not by mining, but by validators who trust each other all nodding together (reaching consensus). This is called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP).
π Light & Shadow
- No mining, so it barely sips electricity and a payment settles in seconds
- Transfer fees are a tiny sliver of a single coin, which is exactly what makes small remittances worth doing
- Unlike its bank-focused sibling, Stellar aims squarely at the unbanked, and the anchor-plus-built-in-exchange design swaps one currency straight into another
- It shares a market with Ripple (XRP), run by the same founder's former project, plus banks' own fast-rails, crowded turf for one job
- Consensus runs βamong validators you trust,β which raises the question of whether power leans toward too few hands (the centralization worry; the SDF foundation also held a large share of coins)
- The code has no hard supply cap. A community vote simply switched off new issuance, so supply is fixed in practice rather than fixed by math like Bitcoin's
𧬠Evolution lineage
Stellar is a sibling of Ripple (XRP). They split through their shared founder, Jed McCaleb (it's not a fork). It started out based on the Ripple protocol, but in 2015 it was redesigned around its own Stellar Consensus Protocol.
π§ Meet other friends
β FAQ
- What is Stellar (XLM)?
- An open-source payment network that helps you send and exchange money or assets across borders, fast and cheaply. Its goal is to bring financial services to people who don't have a bank account. The coin that travels on it is called the βLumen (XLM)β.
- How is it related to Ripple (XRP)?
- They're βsiblingsβ that share a founder. After helping create Ripple, Jed McCaleb left and started Stellar separately in 2014. It isn't a fork (a copy), it's its own codebase, and in 2015 it was redesigned around its own consensus method (SCP).
- Does Stellar use mining?
- No, there's no mining. It uses the βStellar Consensus Protocol (SCP)β, where validators that trust each other gather and agree. That's why it uses very little electricity and confirms transactions very quickly.
- Where can I buy Stellar?
- On most cryptocurrency exchanges. Major platforms like Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance list XLM. Prices swing a lot, so try only a small amount. (Information only, not a recommendation to use any specific exchange or to invest.)
β οΈ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only (MOCK Β· 2026-06-04).