Stellar Network- A Revolution in the Global Payment Industry

Overview

Stellar is an open-source network. It has been designed for global financial establishments dealing with currencies and payments to work together as a single network. It helps create, trade, and send digital currencies in almost all the forms like Bitcoin, Dollars, and many more to anywhere or anyone, globally. This platform connects payment systems, banks, and people at a low cost. It also helps the users to send currencies on the network around the world. Jed McCaleb, Stellar’s founder, is also a co-founder of Ripple. Infact, Stellar was developed from the Ripple protocol. 

What is Stellar?

• Stellar Lumens is a decentralized protocol for converting digital currencies to fiat money, allowing cross-border transactions among any pair of currencies. The term ’Stellar’ refers to a virtual or digital currency developed by Stellar Development Foundation.
• Stellar is traded under the ticker symbol XLM on different cryptocurrency exchanges. The Stellar network is a blockchain distributed ledger network. It connects payment systems, people, and banks, facilitating cross-border, low-cost, cross-asset transfers as well as payments.
• Stellar handles millions of transactions per day. Further, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Stellar depend on blockchain to keep the network in sync and up-to-date. Stellar is considered an efficient, cheaper, and faster blockchain system as compared to the other typical blockchain-based systems.

Faster Transaction Times

Even though several banking systems are facilitating instant transactions, these systems are not connected at a global level. In the globalized economy, there is always a need for instant payments. This emergency empowers businesses to operate efficiently. It also allows the governments, NGOs, and individuals to send instant funds for implementing their strategies into practice. The new norm of the Stellar network complements instant payments. This is achieved through Stellar independent distributed ledger technology. An important fact is that the technology differs from the standard banking system as the transfers occur within seconds.

Less Fees

In the case of sending global payments, users need to pay high fees. But, the transactions done through the Stellar network have a fixed transaction fee of $0.00001 XLM, irrespective of the market price.  Thus, the global payments through Stellar help in sending money instantly. It is just as easy and fast as sending an email.

Global Presence

The Stellar network is not restricted by geographical borders as it has a global presence. The combination of SCP and the distributed ledger, permits Stellar to independently operate from the regulations, governing the financial institutions. Further, the traditional financial institutions are bound by regulations and local standards, thereby making the processing systems and payment gateways to charge high fees.

Decentralized

The traditional system is built on centralized networks. Here, the financial institutions need to validate and approve the transactions as per the regulatory standards. But, decentralization not only permits efficient and quick money transfer but also follows the validation process through standardization. Stellar functions on a network having decentralized servers known as Stellar Cores or validator nodes. These nodes enable effective decision making in order to validate the transactions made on the Stellar distributed technology ledger.

Includes all Entities

The financial system located in different parts of the world often struggles from accessing the money systems. There are also several limitations in the monetary system, possibly due to inadequate infrastructures and inflation. The Stellar network offers stability for the transfer services as well as currency exchange. Thus, the countries struggling with global economic growth can utilize the benefits of a comprehensive and all-inclusive system provided by Stellar.

XLM Prediction

• Like other cryptocurrencies, Stellar also runs on a decentralized network. It is built on distributed ledger technology that keeps the network in sync. The blockchain of Stellar boosts the efficiency of its network, saves time, decreases costs, and helps the network to accomplish efficient cross-border transactions. Even though Stellar is similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is portrayed as a payment and not as a cryptocurrency.
• January 2021 proved to be a lucrative month for Stellar. Its value went up by 60%, and recently Stellar has also hit the two years high of $0.41. This price hike has improved  Stellar’s position remarkably by placing it in the top 10 biggest cryptocurrencies list.
• According to a recent XLM prediction, XLM is good for long-term investments. Based on the recent XLM prediction, a long-term increase of +197.9% is  expected in the next three years.

Stellar’s Future Prospects

• Stellar has collaborated with financial institutions to offer its services on distributed ledger technology, thereby facilitating international money transfers.
• It has partnered with few companies across Africa, Asia, and Europe, including the well-known ICICI Bank. The bank will use Stellar’s infrastructure to manage money transfers across India and other countries.
• In Europe, Stellar is working with Tempo money transfer, developing a remittance solution. In Africa, Stellar is working with Flutterwave for mobile cross-border payments and coins.

Conclusion

Stellar has emerged as one of the best platforms for carrying out cross-border payments effortlessly. Moreover, accurate money transfers can be directly performed around the world within seconds. Stellar uses distributed ledger technology, offering the necessary entities by removing the barriers and creating a global community. Thus, Stellar enables a promising future where people, banks, and financial institutions can quickly deal with the money transfers and that too at an affordable cost.