Stellar (XLM) price, chart and history
Stellar is $0.2152, down 3.17% in the last 24 hours. Market value $7.54 billion, rank #22.
About Stellar
Stellar is a blockchain network built for moving money quickly and cheaply, especially across borders. Its coin, lumens (XLM), pays the tiny network fees and acts as a bridge between currencies. Banks, payment firms and fintech apps use Stellar to issue digital dollars and other stablecoins, send remittances, and represent real-world assets such as tokenised money-market funds. Transactions typically settle within a few seconds and cost a fraction of a cent.
Stellar was started in 2014 by Jed McCaleb, who had earlier co-founded Ripple and created the Mt. Gox exchange, together with Joyce Kim. Its first version was based on Ripple's code, and payments company Stripe provided early funding. The non-profit Stellar Development Foundation maintains the core software, funds ecosystem projects and holds a large share of the lumens supply. In 2015 the network moved to its own consensus design created by Stanford professor David Mazieres.
Instead of mining or staking, Stellar relies on the Stellar Consensus Protocol, where known organisations run validators that each choose which other validators they trust. This keeps it fast and energy-light, but critics say it is less decentralised than Bitcoin or Ethereum, as shown in 2019 when a validator outage briefly stopped the network. Its foundation also controls a big portion of the coins. Smart contracts, added in 2024 through Soroban, are newer and face strong competition from other chains.
- Created by
- Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim
- Launched
- July 31, 2014
- How it's secured
- Stellar Consensus Protocol (federated voting by trusted validators, no mining)
- Supply
- About 50 billion XLM, fixed since inflation ended and 55 billion were burned in 2019
- Run by
- Stellar Development Foundation (non-profit)