Stellar expressed:  Mark your calendars for Meridian 2021, Nov 17 & 18!

Meridian 2021 will work as a forum where experts in finance, policy, and technology from within and beyond the Stellar Ecosystem will be sharing what they’re building and their plans for growth.

These developers and companies connect on Stellar to work effectively and collectively to have a global impact, thus bringing the world closer to true financial inclusion.

Stellar are continuing to strive to help global businesses realize the strengths of Stellar and to build products and services on the top of the network to achieve financial solutions to their respective regions. Businesses will be able to represent their home currency on Stellar, this making it possible easy for them to exchange value with other world currencies on the platform. It is also possible for businesses to set up their own payment rails all on one network, thus bringing interoperability to cross-border payments.

For those who are interested in understanding the Stellar Consensus Protocol:

The Mathematics behind the Stellar Consensus Protocol. The Stellar consensus model is known as Federated Byzantine Agreement System (FBAS).  It was introduced by David Mazieres in 2016. It is based on quorum slices and quorums.

A quorum refers to the minimum number of members who have a deliberative assembly, which is a body that uses parliamentary procedure like the legislature in order to conduct the business of that group.

In the blockchain, Quorum refers to sets of people who can ratify statements in the network.  Quorum slice refers to subsets of quorum. When someone has friends in from all spheres of life, like from the gym, school, work, dance school etc – if all of them agree upon a particular statement, then the group of friends who agree are known as quorum slice.

Consensus between participating people means two contradictory statements cannot be ratified. This is guaranteed if any two quorums have at least one common member, which is called the quorum intersection property.

In an FBAS they have abstract nodes instead of people; however, the principles are the same. In their mathematical work, they have made an effort to present a coherent formal description of these principles and many examples have been demonstrated for those who want to understand it.  The examples range from small “academic” cases through the current Stellar Network.

The mathematical structure of the FBAS is very rich.  Thus, networks which consist of very few nodes will be highly complex.

An important question related to FBAS is whether it is decentralized. Centrality measures are used to assess the degree of decentralization of nodes.  In conclusion Stellar have to state that the Stellar Network evolved towards decentralization between 2019 and 2020 by reshaping their SCC top tier.