Stellar Lumen (XLM)
Stellar was created by Jed McCaleb in 2014. Jed was also the founder of Mt. Gox - one of the largest exchanges of its time. He was also involved in creating Ripple, but chose to go on and create his own non-profit organization and currency.
Like Ripple, the network can be used to send assets quickly across international borders. Banks can use the network, but unlike Ripple, they invest more in developing and poorer countries, to simplify trade between organizations in different countries.
Stellar is decentralized, operated with open source code and the community owns the network rather than a central organization. In 2017, they succeeded in establishing a partnership with, among others, IBM, which actively uses their network.
Advantages
- Fast, cheap international transactions.
- Unlike Ripple, they can also handle tokens, ie coins that represent value but are not XLM, just like Ethereum.
- More decentralized than Ripple.
- Good partnerships such as IBM.
- They have their own decentralized exchange.
Disadvantages
- They use a model that to some extent suffers from inflation. However, inflation is predictable and steady.
- Even though the network is used by people and partners, XLM is still used on a very small scale. The competition is getting tougher.
- They support smart contracts but they are quite limited.
- The organization owns over 80% of the total number of stellar lumens.
- No support for encrypted and secret transactions.
Buying
They can be purchased directly by credit card or bank transfer at CoinBase. They can also be purchased at Binance through credit card (first buy BNB and trade them for Stellar lumens).