The Stellar platform is primarily a tool for making normal currency transfers, but it also has its own cryptocurrency, Lumens. Stellar has value on its own, but unlike Bitcoin, it is not designed to be used as a means of payment. Rather, it is designed to be a last resort intermediary for currency conversion. Like Ripple, it is an unmineable cryptocurrency, 100,000 million tokens were created. The Stellar foundation has the mission of distributing 95% of the tokens, among random people, holders of Bitcoin or Ripple. 5% of the tokens are reserved to maintain the operating costs of the same.
Behind this platform is Jed McCaleb, you will remember him for being Ripple’s programmer in 2011, he left the company in 2013 and focused on creating Mt.Gox, the first Bitcoin exchange that sold and ceased operations in 2014, causing an unprecedented market crash.
This financial platform considerably lowers the costs of transactions between cryptocurrencies, it also allows you to buy Bitcoin with dollars, saving the high commissions of the best-known exchanges and also achieves it in a quite acceptable time.
Stellar is a non-profit open source platform, its goal is to promote financial access and inclusion. It has partnered with global operators and financial institutions, with a lot of emphasis on helping the most disadvantaged also, it has an open Ledger that anyone can access to consult or join.
A Lumen (Stellar’s digital currency) is a unit of digital currency, as is the case with Bitcoin. The lumens or Stellar (as they are mostly known) are the assets of this network. Logically, you cannot have Lumen in your hand, they are a digital asset, but they are essential for the operation of the Stellar network since they contribute to the ability to transfer money around the world quickly and safely.
Lumens have an antispam role on the Stellar blockchain. It achieves this because Lumens are necessary to make a transaction and to avoid accounts with empty balances, thus preventing people from saturating the network. Transactions have a cost of 0.00001 Lumen. This fee would cause malicious users to drown the network with a DoS attack that would consume a large space on the blockchain.
See also:
Cardano and its Cryptocurrency know as ADA
Polkadot, the multi-chain network and its token
