• Stellar breaks away from its “big sister” Ripple
• Crypto pioneer Jed McCaleb involved in founding
• Strong cooperation partners
Stellar – A new star in the crypto sky
The non-profit foundation “Stellar Development Foundation”, SDF for short, was founded as a non-profit organization in the US state of Delaware back in 2014. The organization developed a fully decentralized payment network that allows anyone to send and exchange any currency. The platform uses blockchain technology as infrastructure. For a while, Stellar was considered Ripple’s little sister, as it initially used its protocol. However, SDF made some adjustments to the network, which quickly caused the protocol to become overloaded. According to Stellar, the reason for this was a bug in the Ripple network. Ripple itself rejected the allegations. Stellar has been using its own protocol since the end of 2015. The underlying cryptocurrency is called Stellar Lumen or XLM. For a long time, the protocol used a small rocket as its logo, and since 2019 the project has featured a planet with two rings.
But who is behind the Stellar network?
Above all, there is a clever mind behind the starter cryptocurrency – the US programmer Jed McCaleb. He is the founder of the well-known file-sharing network eDonkey and the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which he later sold to Mark Karpelès.
When McCaleb discovered the then largely unknown digital currency Bitcoin, there was no trading platform for such coins. He reacted quickly and launched Mt. Gox. Some time later he showed his luck again: McCaleb became a co-founder of the cryptocurrency Ripple. However, Ripple eventually parted ways with McCaleb in a multi-million dollar legal battle. One of the reasons for this was that McCaleb had a large number of ideas that those responsible at Ripple did not want to implement. Based on these ideas, McCaleb eventually founded Stellar. McCaleb says he has always thought a lot about improving existing technologies and ultimately using them to make the world a better place and reduce inefficiencies. The founder is still active at SDF as chief architect and sits on the foundation’s board of directors alongside Keith Rabois, Lin-Hua Wu and Ronaldo Lemos.
At Stellar, McCaleb was initially joined by Joyce Kim. Kim previously worked as an attorney at reputable law firms. At the same time, she supported various projects on a voluntary basis. She launched Stellar with McCaleb because this technology could make the world more meaningful, Kim said. However, in 2016 she left the SDF because she wanted to gain new experiences and support new projects. Kim is still supporting McCaleb in an advisory capacity.
Another important member of the founding team was the computer scientist David Mazières from Stanford University. He authored the underlying Stellar Consensus Protocol white paper. Today he still works at Stellar as a senior scientist. Meanwhile, SDF is headed by Denelle Dixon.
Numerous prominent partners already on board
Stellar has been working with IBM since October 2017. The cooperation is about the further development of blockchain technology, as part of which the “all-in-one” platform World Wire was developed. This should be easily integrated into international payment systems and thus speed up transactions for banks. If sums of money from clients are often still transferred to the recipient via a large number of banks as intermediate stations, the process should be significantly shortened. The transaction is to be forwarded via the sender’s bank to the World Wire network, which the recipient’s bank also accesses directly. This should not only make transfers much faster, but also less expensive.
A year earlier, the SDF entered into a cooperation with Deloitte, one of the “Big Four” management consultants worldwide. Other crypto projects also participated in this collaboration to develop a “revolutionary application for cross-border payments”. “Banks are striving to get rid of the old systems […] to replace it.”, according to a consultant at Deloitte. The management consultant has now established itself as a leading company in the acquisition of blockchain technologies. However, the cooperation with Stellar has recently become quiet.
In 2014, the payment service Stripe also invested three million US dollars in Stellar. In return, Stripe received two billion XLM.
SDF also has no shortage of other projects and cooperation partners. The foundation’s partners include Binance, Bitfinex, Coinbase, HTC and many more. In 2017, McCaleb also launched the Stellar-based platform Lightyear, which aims to enable global payment and currency exchange and merged with Chain.com in 2018. The company is now called InterStellar and continues to work closely with the SDF.
No upper limits
According to McCaleb, the world’s financial infrastructure is broken – too many people are living without resources. The aim of the SDF is therefore to enable low-cost transactions for users without access to conventional payment channels. “Stellar makes it possible to create, send and trade digital representations of all forms of money,” says the foundation on its website. “It’s designed to allow all of the world’s financial systems to work together on a single network.” Amounts should be transferred and assets transferred quickly and easily. In the meantime, even ICOs can be carried out via the Stellar platform.
Stellar is now the 24th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of around $3.27 billion.
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