What Is Stellar Blockchain
This week’s blockchain project is Stellar blockchain, a platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.
Stellar was founded in 2014 by Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb. Stellar Lumen (XLM) is the cryptocurrency that fuels Stellar blockchain. Lumens are the native asset of the Stellar network.
Lumen, Stellar Cryptocurrency
Stellar Lumen (XLM) is the cryptocurrency that fuels Stellar blockchain. Lumens are the native asset of the Stellar network. Lumens are available on several licensed exchanges.
According to CMC, the current market cap of XLM is about $8 billion ranked at #6 with the token price $0.21. Current circulation supply of XLM is about 19 billion. Lumen supply is determined by fixed, protocol-level rules. The number of lumens created at genesis was 100 billion. Every year, there is a 1% inflation rate. New lumens cannot be generated arbitrarily by anyone.
While somebody could theoretically push a proposal to change the protocol to change the rule around lumen creation, validators on our network are very unlikely to accept and ratify it. The decentralization of the protocol prevents us from unilaterally controlling any changes — if we tried to force a change, people would lose trust in Stellar.org, refuse to accept the changes, and keep using the original protocol with the original rules. Therefore, we will never do it.
While you can’t hold a lumen in your hand, they are essential to the Stellar network—they contribute to the ability to move money around the world and to conduct transactions between different currencies quickly and securely.
The Stellar network software is open-source and available to the general public. Users will need to have lumens to pay transaction fees and make accounts on the live Stellar network.
There are two special values used to calculate fees:
The base fee (currently 100 stroops) is used in transaction fees.
The base reserve (currently 0.5 XLM) is used in minimum account balances.
Transaction Fee
The fee for a transaction is the number of operations the transaction contains multiplied by the base fee, which is 100 stroops (0.00001 XLM).
Transaction Fee = (# of operations × base fee)
For example, a transaction that allows trust on an account’s trustline (operation 1) and sends a payment to that account (operation 2) would have a fee of 2 × base fee = 200 stroops.
