Stellar is an open-source protocol for value exchange founded in early 2014 by Jed McCaleb (creator of eDonkey) and Joyce Kim. Its board members and advisory board members include Keith Rabois, Patrick Collison, Matt Mullenweg, Greg Stein, Joi Ito, Sam Altman, Naval Ravikant and others. The Stellar protocol is supported by a nonprofit, the Stellar Development Foundation.
Video Stellar (payment network)
History
In 2014, Jed McCaleb, founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple, launched the network system Stellar with former lawyer Joyce Kim. Before the official launch, McCaleb formed a website called "Secret Bitcoin Project" seeing alpha testers. The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was created in collaboration with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the project officially launched that July. Stellar received $3 million in seed funding from Stripe. Stellar was released as a decentralized payment network and protocol with a native currency, stellar. At its launch, the network had 100 billion stellars. 25 percent of those would be given to other non-profits working toward financial inclusion. Stripe received 2 percent or 2 billion of the initial stellars in return for its seed investment. The cryptocurrency, originally known as stellar, was later called Lumens or XLM. In August 2014, Mercado Bitcoin, the first Brazilian bitcoin exchange, announced it would be using the Stellar network. By January 2015, Stellar had approximately 3 million registered user accounts on its platform and its market cap was almost $15 million.
The Stellar Development Foundation released an upgraded protocol with a new consensus algorithm in April 2015 which went live in November 2015. The new algorithm used SCP, a cryptocurrency protocol created by Stanford professor David Mazières.
Maps Stellar (payment network)
Real-world applications
Nonprofit organizations and businesses are implementing Stellar as their financial infrastructure, particularly in the developing world. One such example is Praekelt Foundation.
Oradian, a cloud-based banking software company, also plans to use the Stellar network to connect microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Nigeria.
In December 2016, more partnerships were announced, including in the Philippines, India and West Africa.
In October 2017, Stellar partnered with IBM and KlickEx to facilitate cross-border transactions in the South Pacific region. The cross-border payment system developed by IBM includes partnerships with many large banks including Deloitte.
In 2018, Stellar announced their affiliation with Keybase to eliminate the need of extended cryptographic addresses for international transactions.
In March 2018, the DigitalBits Project announced that they had forked the Stellar software to support the loyalty and rewards market as their initial use case.
Overview
Stellar is an open-source protocol for exchanging money using blockchain technology. The platform's source code is hosted on Github. The Stellar network can quickly exchange government-based currencies with 2 to 5 second processing times. The platform is a distributed ledger maintained by a consensus algorithm, which allows for decentralized control, flexible trust, low latency, and asymptotic security.
Servers run a software implementation of the protocol, and use the Internet to connect to and communicate with other Stellar servers, forming a global value exchange network. Each server stores a record of all "accounts" on the network. These records are stored in a database called the "ledger". Servers propose changes to the ledger by proposing "transactions", which move accounts from one state to another by spending the account's balance or changing a property of the account. All of the servers come to agreement on which set of transactions to apply to the current ledger through a process called "consensus". The consensus process happens at a regular interval, typically every 2 to 4 seconds. This keeps each server's copy of the ledger in sync and identical.
References
External links
- Stellar Foundation
Source of article : Wikipedia
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