Reliable money is almost a myth for many countries. Local economic disruption could leave a devastating effect on families in several nations such as Venezuela, India or Argentina. There is a dire need of money system that can assure solid stability of your savings, despite your local economy issues like runaway inflation. This is where Stellar shows promise.

Kudos to Jed McCaleb & Joyce Kim

Stellar was founded in 2014 by Mt. Gox founder and Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb and erstwhile lawyer Joyce Kim. The vision behind the development of Stellar was to provide a global and stable financial network where people from any country would be able to participate and carry affordable money transfer, regardless of their residential nation.

Essentially, Stellar is a multi-currency payment backend which can be used by thousands and thousands of people every day to settle payments, issue assets and trade. It’s an open-source, decentralized and developer-friendly blockchain system but it works more of like cash. In fact, the Stellar blockchain is much faster and more affordable than Bitcoin and even consumes far less electricity.

McCaleb and his team have also developed a non-profit organization, Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) to support the growth and development of Stellar network.

Easy forex conversion at best rates

Stellar houses a distributed exchange framework where users can send payment in any currency of the world even when they are holding USD credit. The Stellar would function as an automatic forex conversion portal here and transfer the money at the best available rates.

It’s just that you would have to hold Lumens or Stellar cryptocurrency (XLM) in order to move money or hold money on Stellar. The XLM acts like an intermediate asset in the transaction process. But what I really like here is that the Lumens to be used during the transaction will charge a very nominal transaction fee. For example, if person A would want to send $500 to person B who would want the money in MEX, the total Lumens transaction cost that s/he would have to pay here is just $0.000001.

What makes Stellar so crucial today?

Stellar and SDF is guided by the mission to explore the optimum potential of global economy by making money more fluid, creating more open markets and empowering people to make the most of global financial ecosystem.

• Stellar has introduced a global payment system which allows users to look beyond their regional economy and interact straight with world market. What’s so special about Stellar is that it frees a person from his geographical restrictions and allows him to hold, own or send any currency in the world.
• Stellar makes money transaction faster and more affordable through its P2P model that removes presence of middlemen.
• Stellar doesn’t have a particular owner and it is available for everyone. As no specific organization controls the Stellar network, nobody can monopolize its operations, hoard its data or shut off the whole network.
• Stellar can handle any kind of currency and its scope isn’t limited to crypto only.
• Stellar assures very negligible and almost-free transaction fees. The nominal fee structure further opens up possibilities for use cases like micropayments which aren’t viable with other systems due to high costs.
• Lumens assure excellent ledger spam deterrence thanks to its strategic reserve requirements and transaction fees. Any effort towards creating account spin offs or spam transactions on Stellar would be simply unprofitable.

It’s true that XLM prices are witnessing a bearish trend of late. But, we shouldn’t also deny the fact that Stellar has been able to emerge as a promising project which has already been integrated with or are in alliance with some of the most leading business corporations such as Microsoft, IBM and Deloitte among others. then, of course, the coin has the backing of none other than veteran crypto guru McCaleb. In that light, the crypto world is actually expecting a powerful surge in XLM price in the coming year.