Stellar Lumens are now ready than before to help developers to roll up their sleeves to build solutions to deal with real-world challenges.

Meridian 2020 discussed a lot about the network itself, thus discussing about Protocol development, and how to build apps to take advantage of protocol features, and Horizon Stellar API.

For Clarity, Horizon is an API for interacting with the Stellar network.  This API works as a bridge between the apps and Stellar Core. Projects like wallets, decentralized exchanges, and asset issuers make use of Horizon to submit transactions, query an account balance, or stream events like transactions to an account.

Horizon is a Restful API, which can be accessed through cURL, a browser, or one of the Stellar SDK. To reduce the complexity of projects, developers are recommend you use an SDK instead of making direct API calls.  The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) runs two instances of Horizon, where one is for interacting with the public network and another is for interacting with the testnet.

Fundamentally, it is important to understand about nodes.  Stellar is a peer-to-peer network which is made up of nodes, which are made up of computers which can communicate and validate transactions to it. Users should understand what it takes to run a node and how to do it in the first place in a way to create and support a decentralized network.

Nodes are what make decentralization a reality. Marta Lokhava, Software Engineer, Stellar Development Foundation; Konstantin Richter, Ceo & Co-Founder, Blockdaemon; and Dr. Torsten Stüber CTO, Satoshipay spoke on the topic Achieving Decentralization on the Stellar Network (Meridian 2020 Day 1) and it is now available in full for view on You Tube.

Those who missed the session can now revisit and learn why Stellar is a distributed system with no central authority—meaning no one can stop the network or secretly adjust the numbers to their liking. Also know about how even without a central authority, the ledgers are verified and updated, every five seconds. Everything stays in sync they say because of the unique algorithm, known as the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), and the nodes which run this core Stellar software.

There is also a video on Horizon’s new Architecture, which details on how Horizon makes it easy for the users to plug in to the power of the Stellar Network without having to understand the details about distributed consensus.  There are several significant improvements happening in the Horizon and it is worth knowing it.