A payment network built for moving currencies cheaply, with a nonprofit steering it.
Stellar is designed for issuing and exchanging representations of real currencies rather than for general computation. Its built-in order book lets a payment convert between assets automatically along a path, which suits remittances and cross-currency transfers. Its stewardship is unusual: a nonprofit foundation, not a commercial company, which shapes how it approaches financial access.
The network's value is in anchors and corridors, not in smart contract activity.
Cheap fees by design means limited token value capture from volume.
Nonprofit stewardship changes incentives compared with company-led payment networks.
Stellar uses federated Byzantine agreement: each node chooses which other nodes it trusts, and agreement emerges from the overlap between those quorum slices. Assets are issued by anchors, entities that hold the real currency and issue a matching token, so using a Stellar dollar means trusting whoever issued it. The protocol also runs a native order book, letting payments route through conversions automatically.
Minimal transaction fees on the network
Account reserves required to hold assets
Bridge asset for currency pairs without a direct market
XLM's role is deliberately minimal. It pays very small transaction fees, is required as a minimum account reserve, and acts as a bridge asset when no direct market exists between two currencies. Because fees are tiny by design and stablecoin transfers can route directly, payment volume on Stellar does not create proportional demand for XLM. That is a design choice for cheap payments, not an oversight, but it caps the token's upside from usage.
Anchor dependency: an issued asset is only as good as the institution backing it.
Weak token value capture from payment volume, by design.
Direct competition from stablecoins on cheaper general-purpose chains.
Adoption depends on regulated partners in each corridor, which is slow institutional work.
Smaller developer ecosystem than general-purpose smart contract networks.
Last verified:
Stellar · stellar.org · primary source
The project's official site, retrieved on the date shown, supporting how it describes itself. It does not establish supply, governance or issuance mechanics.
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