Are you searching the web to find out "what is Stellar coin" or "what is Stellar crypto"? Search no more. Stellar (XLM) is a blockchain platform for transferring digital assets across the globe. Stellar is an open-source project, so anyone can suggest changes to improve the platform. The main goal of the project is to provide anybody with the ability to make quick, cheap, and safe payments.
Stellar was launched in 2014 as a direct competitor to Ripple by one of the founders of XRP, Jed McCaleb. In a way, it is a reassessment of the Ripple platform. McCaleb believed that Ripple wasn't decentralized enough, while others feature didn't meet his expectations from the blockchain technology at all.
Unlike most cryptocurrencies that appeared later, the launch of the XLM token was not funded by an ICO. At the very beginning, the development of the project was supported by Stripe (a suite of payment APIs that powers e-commerce) that invested around $3 million in the project.
Stellar was originally launched as a fork of Ripple, which used a consensus mechanism based on the Byzantine Generals Task (BFT). Still, in 2015 the platform switched to its code developed by David Mazier - the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP).
The platform's transition to SCP completely broke its connection with Ripple. In essence, the principle of operation of SCP and BFT is similar, but in the latter, block validators are predefined by a company or organization in control.
The development of its own consensus algorithm allowed Stellar to solve the main drawback of Ripple - the lack of decentralization. In the Stellar network, each participant can create a node and participate in the formation of blocks.
It takes two to five seconds to generate a block, and hence to reach consensus on the Stellar network. The nodes in the SCP themselves determine which nodes they trust. Together, they form the so-called "quorum," which, when a certain number of nodes are added to it, reaches a consensus. SCP was designed as a more decentralized alternative to BFT. But for this, some part of security was sacrificed, since anyone can participate in the formation of blocks.
What is stellar mining?
Stellar does not have a mining-based currency, doesn't use the Proof-of-Work algorithm, and therefore can't be mined like Bitcoin. Instead, Stellar rewards Nodes at a 1% inflation rate per year. New coins are generated weekly and distributed via a voting method. Of course, you can always buy or sell XLM on the Coinbase, Binance, Changelly, and other exchanges.
