Why I’m long on Stellar
Market Cap: $13,531,081,842 USD
What is Stellar?
Stellar is Open-Source, Distributed Payments Infrastructure.
It connects people, payment systems, and banks. Integrate with Stellar to move money quickly, reliably, and for a fraction of a penny.
Stellar was born in 2014. Stripe invested $3 Million, which was repaid with 2 Billion Stellar coins called Lumens (XLR). The Stellar team attracted prestigious advisors like Patrick Collison, (Stripe), Sam Altman (President at Y combinator) and Matt Mullenweg (Founder of WordPress). Stellar was now poised to rethink how people interact with payment systems and banks.
Source: https://hackernoon.com/why-stellar-could-be-the-next-big-ico-platform-f48fc3cb9a6c
More information can be sourced at https://www.stellar.org/
What’s different?
The Stellar Consensus Protocol white paper can seem complex because it’s not blockchain. The protocol is more like an evolution of blockchain and that’s a good thing. The paper highlights key features: decentralized control, low latency, flexible trust and asymptotic security. Of these four features, proof of work blockchains are only capable of decentralized control and even that can be compromised as we have seen in Bitcoin.
The protocol works through the use of quorums, which are a set of nodes used to reach an agreement. The Stellar network is able to process a large number of transactions quickly and for fractions of a penny because there is no mining involved. The quorums securely reach consensus by exchanging signatures. For a better understanding of how this works, I encourage you to read the white paper but what we are left with is a platform that solves blockchain’s shortfalls right now.
Whitepaper: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf
Nearest Competitor (Payments Space)
https://ripple.com/
Roadmap
The Stellar team has to be commended here. They have successfully worked with Developers on Stellar Core, Horizon, and the SDK and more broadly opened the door to strategic partners (more on this later), financial institutions, and consulting firms.
The roadmap in later 16/17 then gets really interesting (and also a little questionable). With 2 billion underbanked or unbanked people worldwide, financial inclusion is an unsolved problem. With this goal in mind their focus more recently is on Nigeria.
View the roadmap on their blog here https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/
View their EoY Round Up here
https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-2017-end-year-roundup/
Key Partners
They have some pretty BIG names as partners including:
* IBM
* Deloitte
* Stripe
Full List here
https://www.stellar.org/about/directory
Upcoming Events & Meetups
- Dec 17th — Mumbai: Stellar Advanced Workshop on Blockchain
- Dec 19 — Hong Kong: Intro to Stellar — Cross-Border Payments & ICOs
- Dec 21st — Bangkok: Intro to Stellar — Cross-Border Payments & ICOs
- Jan 8th — Singapore: Stellar — Blockchain For Payments
Interesting Recent News
KIK Plans to move ICO from ETH to XLM
https://www.coindesk.com/goodbye-ethereum-kik-plans-move-ico-tokens-stellar/
MobileCoin plans to ICO on XLM
https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/
Note: The Creator of Signal Involved
Mobius plans & Zed to ICO on XLM
https://mobius.network/ and http://zed.network/#ZEDTokenDate
Note: The Creator of Ripple / Stellar Involved
Targets
In the short to medium term I see a pull back from Bitcoin and other majors mixed with news above could see a new ATH in a matter of days.
Now this is where I get a little lost but I’m learning fast.
I’m seeing in the charts that there has been a healthy consolidation and Indicators looking great for a move with bollinger bands getting closer together, MACD stable and RSI trending up.
My view is LONG and if i’m right who knows where it could go… Moon?!
I recommend Binance — use my link here https://www.binance.com/?ref=15115727
