Stella Price Today

The current real-time Stella price is $0.10 . XLM price has plummeted by 2.22% in the last day and increased by 15.89% in the last seven days. It’s important to note that the current Stella market capitalization is $2,983,344,844. The maximum supply is 50,001,806,812.00 XLM coins, with a circulating supply of 29,287,885,630.70. XLM is ranked #29 in terms of market cap.

What is Stellar?

Stellar (XLM) is a decentralized payments network designed to facilitate low transaction costs, high scalability, and fast settlement times. The project aims to become the de facto network for financial transactions and moving resources between financial institutions. To achieve this, Stellar will connect worldwide financial systems together via its Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. 

The core design for the Stellar network and its custom system for transaction validation allows the payments network to offer extremely cheap transactions that take a fraction of the energy of some other blockchains. As such, Stellar is popular for cross-border or small-value transactions. Stellar also makes it easy to create custom currencies that exist on its network. 

Jed McCaleb (co-founder and CTO of Ripple) and Joyce Kim, a lawyer, founded Stellar in 2013. The project was conceived following disagreements regarding Ripple's future. 

Stellar Under The Hood

When we look at the project's ecosystem, Stellar generally refers to the decentralized P2P payments network. The lumen (XLM) is the propriety token used to pay transaction fees, cover account activation costs, and transfer value across the network.  

In contrast to projects like Ethereum, which utilize Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Stellar has created its own consensus protocol called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). The company also built the Proof-of-Agreement (PoA) consensus mechanism. PoA facilitates non-mining transaction validation by sending many fast messages between network participants to confirm transactions. 

Being a network designed for payments, Stellar is highly efficient and benefits from low transaction costs. The average cost of sending a transaction on the network is around 0.00005 XLM, or just $0.000004. Moreover, the network boasts extremely fast settlement times of around five seconds. These characteristics are achieved in large part thanks to the PoA consensus mechanism. 

What's Unique About Stellar

It's no secret that building an efficient transactional cryptocurrency is the goal of many projects. However, Stellar differentiates itself through its support for all types of money, whether it is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or a fiat currency like USD or EUR. As such, Stellar is popular in countries with a weak national currency where it helps to diversify into other currencies. 

Although Stellar previously had an inflationary mechanism where the supply of XLM increased by 1% annually, the community agreed to scrap the system. Moreover, The Stellar Development Foundation burned around 50% of the XLM supply in 2019, strengthening the remaining tokens substantially. A portion of transaction fees are also stored in a locked wallet, reducing circulating supply. 

Stellar Partnerships 

Similar to XRP, Stellar has focused on building high-value partnerships with key players in the financial sector. Some of Stellar's most notable partnerships include money transfer company MoneyGram, USDC issuer Circle, and technology titan IBM. The project's partnerships will help position Stellar in the global financial market. 

Stellar Price History

Originally called STR, XLM officially launched in 2014 at a price of around $0.002373, where it remained until 2017, despite a few ups and downs.

April 2017 saw a significant rise in demand for XLM as the crypto market performed well and hype surrounding the Stellar IBM partnership took hold, leading the asset to hit $0.0045. However, late 2017 and early 2018 saw XLM explode, rising to an all-time high of $0.8924. 

As the crypto market cooled off, XLM experienced a sharp price correction, causing the asset to slide down toward  $0.23 in October 2018. The asset continued falling throughout 2019, bottoming out around $0.05 in 2020. The final quarter of 2020 and early 2021 saw XLM go parabolic, climbing from $0.07848 in November to $0.6499 in May 2021. 

Amidst profit-taking and market-wide uncertainty due to the pandemic and war, XLM crumbled, falling consistently throughout 2022 and entering 2023 at $0.07365. XLM briefly spiked to $0.1558 in July but fell slightly, coming into 2024 at $0.1296. This year, there has been little demand for XLM and mass uncertainty in the market, leading XLM to trade for $0.10 today.