Harnessing the power of Stellar
This past month has seen highs for the Stellar platform, ranging from the cryptocurrency surging to surpass Litecoin to take 6th place in terms of overall market cap, to 1,000,000 accounts on the Ledger as of August 27th. As the cryptocurrency soars, it’s truly exciting to see how Stellar is building an ecosystem of fast, transparent, and inclusive projects aligned with LendLedger’s network. Here are some of the key features and fellow projects that makes us proud to be on Stellar network.
Speeds of Light
On the Stellar network the entire process of coming to consensus occurs approximately every 2–5 seconds. This is staggering when compared to Ethereum’s 14 seconds and Bitcoin’s several minutes. Additionally, Stellar currently claims that it can process 1,000+ transactions per second, even with 1 billion accounts on the ledger. Again, this comes in contrast to Ethereum’s 25 transactions per second and Bitcoin, which can process only 7 per second.
One pioneering project taking advantage of these Stellar speeds is Mobius. The platform aims to “make it easy to connect every device, developer and data stream to the blockchain ecosystem” by creating a Decentralized App (DApp) Store that will disintermediate and decentralize the $6.3 trillion 2021 App Economy. Mobius attributed the use of Stellar over Ethereum to the latter’s capacity to facilitate, scale, and process large quantities of transactions at speed.
Transaction costs we can get behind
Projects like ours, which center on lending to emerging markets, require low transaction fees so our borrowers can pay back their loans in the small increments that work best for them. From the outset Stellar has been a favored platform for remittances and payments because the cost of making a payment through their blockchain is only <$0.00001. This is cheaper than Stellar’s direct competitor Ripple, who’s transaction costs stand at 0.0003. These undercut Ethereum’s cost of $0.76 per transaction and massively outstrip Bitcoin’s rate of $42 per transaction. There are two projects in particular which we believe will leverage this Stellar asset to disrupt the face of future finance.
In October Stellar announced a dual partnership with IBM and KlickEx to develop a blockchain-based cross-border payments solution proven to significantly reduce transaction costs and increase transaction speeds. KlickEx holds the mission of lowering the costs of cross-border payments and is ranked as the number one low-cost remittance service in all of Asia by International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Bank. With cross-border payments currently taking up to several days to clear, the new implementation has the potential to change the way money is moved globally.
Inclusive Mission
What attracted LendLedger to the Stellar platform was our shared mission of financial inclusion. Stellar’s non-profit platform, established in 2014, works to promote global financial access, literacy, and inclusion. Just like us, Stellar agrees that universal access to affordable, financial services are a fundamental right. It’s therefore no surprise that other pioneering projects are operating on the platform with the same vision..
One of them is SureRemit. With the goal of to allowing users to bypass excessive remittance fees, charging only 0–2%, as opposed to the 7–12% charged by banks, SureRemit taps into a market where 250 million immigrants remit $600 billion annually. It also allows senders to ensure the money they transfer cross border is being used for the intended purpose. These dual uses could completely recast the face of remittances, making sending money “trustless”and significantly furthering financial inclusion.
The X-cellent Future of Stellar
No article on Stellar would be complete without mention of Stellar X. Launched last week, the Stellar X decentralized exchange allows the trade of tokens peer to peer with no intermediary interference. Unlike other exchanges out there the Stellar X Exchange is not only without trading charges but also guarantees to refund all related network costs. Just like the incredibly attractive low transaction fees discussed earlier, this lack of cost can be explained that the fact that the Stellar protocol requires neither proof of work nor proof of stake; so it doesn’t need your capital to function. All of the brilliant projects mentioned above will be available on the Stellar exchange once they go live.
