While bitcoin is kind of standing still, we continue to look at other crypto charts. EOS and stellar are battling for the fifth and sixth places in terms of market cap. The appearance of stellar tokens on Blockchain.com along with the possibility of listing on Coinbase seem a good enough reason to look closely at this project and evaluate its prospects. Stellar may never become the second bitcoin, but it has the potential to outshine ethereum. If that happens, stellar will be a good investment opportunity.
Compared to bitcoin’s tenth anniversary, stellar is a young project. It was launched in 2014 by Jed McCulib, known as the creator of the infamous exchange Mt.Gox and Ripple payment system. As is common in the world of cryptocurrency, the Ripple team and Makcaliba disagreed on the development strategies, which led to the emergence of stellar. The new payment system is faster than its predecessor and has a somewhat ‘global reach’. If Ripple is exclusively designed for financial organizations, the support of smart contracts and DApps makes stellar a token nearly for everyone.
As a result, it’s number six in terms of market cap and the whole world has their eyes on it.
Just like any blockchain, stellar has its own cryptocurrency – Lumens, trading under the XRP ticker – the capitalization stands at $4.5 billion and daily trading volume at $50 million. Inside the blockchain is stellar Consensus Protocol, solving the Byzantine generals’ problem – a fast and reliable solution that allows you to track the movement of crypto assets. To explain how it all works, the creators drew comics – going over the protocol in detail. As always, there are complaints about the distribution of XRP and decentralization of stellar: some amount is stored by the Stellar Development Foundation, some more is distributed between users every week. Only the time can tell whether these claims have any foundations. Meanwhile, the owners of the wallets are in a hurry to join the pools distributing this cryptocurrency.
Despite its relative ‘youth’, stellar already has a number of large projects implemented on its basis. IBM uses it for cross-border payments – a partnership which opened many doors for stellar. There is a StellarX exchange. Another example is the Slice project that promises to tokenize American real estate and, accordingly, ease access for international investors to the old market – there are no boundaries for cryptocurrencies. And then there is Veridium project, which intends to capitalize on natural assets, such as carbon dioxide emissions, which have become a large international market.
When you hear the word ICO, the first thing that comes to mind is probably ethereum. Most of the projects released tokens on this blockchain. We can't say that stellar is waiting in the wings of the ethereum. But taking into account the problems of the latter and successful cases of the former, one can assume that in the years to come customers will increasingly be choosing stellar as a platform. That, by the way, will inevitably affect the price of the token.
Among other interesting facts that are worth mentioning, stellar is the first cryptocurrency complying with the Sharia law. The conservatism of the Arab market is compensated by the limitless loyalty of its users and the great prospects it provides. The countries of the Persian Gulf are actively developing cryptocurrencies and blockchains, the oil money will not fail to make it rain here. A fact from another book – the employee gender balance. The Stellar Foundation is very proud that half of its employees are women. We live in a strange world, who knows, maybe these very factors will play a key role.
As is true with any project, both internal and external events feed the interest in stellar. You never know which ones are more important. We are waiting for the implementation of Spotlight, an analogue of bitcoin's Lighting network. Rumor has it that the Stellar Foundation will launch its own decentralized exchange. Apart from that, Blockchain.com’s largest wallets service added stellar to join ethereum, bitcoin cash, and Litecoin on its list. To attract attention to this event, there will be an airdrop of $125 million-worth of XLM tokens. It’s not too late to participate, all you have to do is register and go through KYC.
Despite the fact that XLM is successfully trading on major exchanges, most of the turnover is provided by Binance. Thanks to tightly observing the American law, the cryptocurrency behemoth is slowly but surely becoming a benchmark for altcoins. Wherever tokens are traded, the market expects them to appear on the Coinbase Pro site. As the BAT token began to go up in anticipation of bidding, the owners of stellar lumens held still waiting. Coinbase can be considered a representative of institutional investors. Despite the clear listing procedure – whether the currency will fall on Coinbase or not is like coffee reading, which Twitter successfully substitutes nowadays – several Coinbase top managers have followed stellar’s Twitter account. The community considered this to be an alert.
Among the many blockchains there is a constant battle for speed, reliability, capitalization, big customers, and elegant solutions. The next year promises a lot of surprises and most likely a change in the positions of cryptocurrency ratings. If the dynamics keep up, stellar has every chance to get ahead.