This is not financial advice.
During the last two weeks Stellar illustrated high social activity. To start with, Mastercard is now starting to build on the blockchain after teaming up with Stellar. This partnership will allow the company to support and use the blockchain tech. Also the main keynote of Stellar’s activity is Coinsquare’s acquisition of StellarX. StellarX will continue to operate and grow under its own brand. To continue, Stellar Foundation, the non-profit custodian of the cryptocurrency, funds $1 million SatoshiPay grant program. Stellar powers the SatoshiPay network and ensures payments run smoothly. And now the Stellar Development Foundation has earmarked the micropayments provider as a route to wider adoption. Last but not least Abellx android app for Stellar is live along with IOS app. Finally, Stellar’s meetups in Cape Town, Munich, NYC and Singapore are expected to take place.
Development
In the new year Stellar’s team will be proactively reaching out to existing wallet projects in the ecosystem to share and discuss these guidelines. By mid-2019 Stellar aims to have all projects listed on the Stellar.org wallets page up to spec in meeting these guidelines and standards.
Starting in the first quarter of 2019,Stellar will be changing the format of the Stellar Build Challenge (SBC) to be a short-term, highly focused hackathon held once a quarter. The major changes that are to be implemented are:
- Stellar is only accepting new projects created during the build challenge to encourage a limited time window for innovation.
- The first new SBC duration will be two weeks (down from three months), and Stellar will continue to iterate on the ideal timeframe.
- The judging process will be more typical of a hackathon, including several unique prizes that focus on highlighting new and interesting ideas.
- The rewards distributed will be more for this format, with the emphasis on celebrating innovation rather than providing long-term financial support.
- New Generation Wallets, 2FA and More…
Stellar is introducing a large update to Stellarport starting with:
- New Generation Wallets
- Recovery Phrases
- Login with nickname/password
- 2 Factor Authentication
- Account Linking
- Multiple Other Fixes/Enhancements
- Abellx android app for Stellar is live
Main features of the release:
- Stellar Asset Trading. Denominated in XLM and other tethered assets (USD, EUR, XCN, BTC, ETH )
- Wallet for your Stellar based assets. Search and add any Stellar token
- Deposits and withdrawals on chain via APAY, Interstellar and NaoBTC. More Anchor integrations coming soon
- StellarGuard multi-sig compatible
- QR code to receive and send payments
- 2FA via Google Authenticator
- More details on asset and Anchor via TOML files
- Trustlines management. Add and remove TrustLines from the app
Social encounters
Anshuman Mehta and Brian Koralewski, General Partners, Austere Capital analyze the XLM token model in context of Stellar’s vision of developing a new financial system for the world. They unpack the sources of returns and determine whether these are attributable to token holders.
Four sources of revenues for the Stellar ecosystem — and not all of these accrued value to XLM holders.
- Operation Fees — write to the Stellar network’s distributed database:
At a market price of $0.36 (as of Feb 8, 2018) this stream only contributes c. $115,000 revenue to token holders. This makes intuitive sense — Stellar wishes to keep network near free to use to enable micropayments. However, it does not bode well for Lumen holders. - XLM as Medium of Exchange — Lend or sell Lumens as a ‘step-through’ currency instead of dollar:
To align the INR/XLM and XLM/NGN trades above, the protocol will require, for a brief period, an adequate supply of XLM. For 4.5 seconds to be precise, which is the time required to settle a transaction. Purchasing or leasing XLM from holders, perhaps for a small fee, can fulfill this temporary requirement for XLM. Banks run similar businesses in their Equities Finance and Repo desks. The economics are well understood and subject to market dynamics.
In theory, anchors purchasing XLM from the public to maintain trading reserves would represent an excellent source of revenue to token holders. However, the Stellar Whitepaper provisions for airdrops to anchors. It is not clear if these airdrops will suffice for the anchor’s requirements, thereby eliminating any market transaction in XLM. This presents a substantial risk to token returns.
3. Asset-pair Trading
Each leg of an asset-pair transaction (e.g. INR/XLM and XLM/NGN in our example) will require market makers — anchors that take the opposite side of each trade leg. In the FX world, these are usually entities that have a natural position in that currency (e.g. Indian or Nigerian banks or corporates). Such market making activities are a well-established business model across traded markets. Dealers generally make markets for a small bid / offer margins — i.e. the difference between buy and sell prices.
Similarly, we expect Stellar anchors to take small margins for this service. The revenue thus earned is attributable to trading operations, not to public XLM holders.
4. Commercialization of the Protocol
In 2017, the Stellar Foundation assigned some core team members to Lightyear (www.lightyear.io). The Stellar — Lightyear relationship is based on the Linux Foundation — Red Hat model. Lightyear will be tasked with commercializing the Stellar protocol — generating revenue through consulting, customization, implementation and maintenance contracts from its enterprise clients. In an oblique sense, Lightyear’s success may lead to increased demand for XLM tokens subject to the constraints described in Revenue Streams 1, 2 and 3 above. However, whilst Lightyear’s business activities represent significant revenue potential, this revenue will be attributable to Lightyear’s own corporate structure, it’s employees and common stock shareholders. None of this revenue will funnel back to XLM holders.
Jed McCaleb. Businessman. After escaping the Mt. Gox debacle mostly unscathed, Mr. McCaleb didn’t waste time. In 2011 he founded Ripple, left it three years later to found Stellar. Stellar has been making steady progress and has firmly entrenched as one of the “blue chips” of the crypto universe.
Upcoming events:
The next Stellar Cluster will be in New York on March 4. Featuring presentations by Konstantin Richter, CEO of http://Blockdaemon.com and Lisa Nestor, the Stellar’s partner. Community clusters are a great place to learn how to build on Stellar.
- Cape Town Stellar Meetup on 28 March. It is the first official event in South Africa featuring presentations by Helghardt and Rehive team.
- Stellar’s Jedd McCaleb and IBM’s Jesse Lund take the stage at this year’s Money 20/20 Conference (19–21 March, 2019)
The workshop is addressed to:
- crypto beginners
- business people with interest in the crypto world
- everyone who is interested in blockchain technology
* The tutorial on YouTube for people that cannot participate: How to make a custom token on Stellar.
The agenda in total:
- Introduction of Stellar (20 min)
- Stellar Usecases (30 min)
- Topic three open
- Discussion and networking
Come meet and mingle with fellow Stellar builders and entrepreneurs at the beautiful AWS Loft in SoHo listening to a fantastic line up of speakers.
Finance
Coinsquare, the biggest crypto exchange in Canada, has acquired StellarX. StellarX will continue to operate and grow under its own brand.
Investors now are paying attention to Stellar, a company that aims to do something similar to what Ripple, an American technology company which develops the Ripple payment protocol and exchange network, is planning to do. The company is attempting to develop a ledger which will be easily scalable with a more efficient way of doing transactions between traditional banking institutions. Speculators argue that in the coming few weeks, XLM will follow its participant indicating that it will go for a parallel bull run.
Blockport is an easy-to-use cryptocurrency exchange that bridges the traditional world of finance with the new digital economy of cryptocurrency. The Blockport Beta platform allows you to buy, sell and exchange leading cryptocurrencies directly with Euro. Blockport users can now buy and sell XLM directly on Blockport trading platform.
Celsius builds a next generation of decentralized lending and borrowing products leveraging cryptocurrency. Celsius is a new global platform that utilizes the global blockchain technology to enable peer to peer lending. Celsius is a Membership organization which enables peer to peer lending where the credit limit and the interest rate is based on what is the best interest on the entire membership not just the lenders.
BankCEX will open trading for XLM/BTC, XLM/ETH, XLM/USDT, XLM/BANK trading pairs at 2019/02/13 3:00 AM (UTC).
The Stellar protocol was built to handle network congestion and ensure that legitimate transactions make it to the network quickly. The mechanism responsible for that is called Surge Pricing and it has been working flawlessly. Surge Pricing isn’t very well documented at the moment, so the article covers FAQ to explain what it is and how it works, and to let you know what you can do to adjust your network fees to take advantage of it.
Main features of the article:
- Is Stellar under attack?
- So what are all these new transactions on the network?
- How many transactions per second does Stellar actually support?
- What happens when more than 50 transactions are submitted for a ledger?
- A small transaction, containing one operation, counts the same as a big transaction with 100 operations?
- Why 50 transactions per ledger, can’t we just increase that limit?
- Do failed transactions count to that limit?
- Fees? You said Stellar is free!
- My Stellar wallet doesn’t even let me choose my fee.
- Will I pay the extra fees even if the network is not in Surge Pricing?
- Will the minimum operation fee ever go up?
- What is the SDF doing to mitigate this situation?
- Stellar Foundation funds $1 million SatoshiPay grant program
SatoshiPay is on fire now. After scoring a partnership with Europe’s largest publishing house Axel Springer earlier this year, they’re at it again, this time it’s by divvying up a $1 million grant from the Stellar Foundation. SatoshiPay and Stellar have history. Stellar powers the SatoshiPay network, and ensures payments run smoothly. And now, the Stellar Development Foundation — the non-profit custodian of the cryptocurrency — has earmarked the micropayments provider as a route to wider adoption.
Roadmap
Stability improvements:
· We now distinguish peers that we’ve never heard of from peers that we have been able to connect to. This should increase the overall quality of peers that are being used by the network.
· SCP: there was a minor issue in the SCP code (nomination protocol) that could cause excessive timeouts in some cases.
· archive nodes would sometimes fail to publish, causing retries and delays in publishing new snapshots
· fix issue where the COMMANDS config was not working properly on startup
· improved performance when processing failed trades in order book
· fix crash when starting two stellar-core processes sharing the same buckets folder
· improved performance and reliability when downloading files during catchup
· performance: avoid creating too many files in the same folder during catchup
· performance: avoid forwarding too many messages when peers connect to each other
· updated to latest asio release
New features:
· metrics have been simplified and documented
· added progress meter when catching up (applying bucket)
· ability to log (debug/trace) transactions and their results
· SCP status includes delayed validator information to help identify slow validators in quorum
· new command line format now accepts global switches anywhere (ie before or after sub-command name)
Partnerships and team members
Mastercard is now starting to build on the blockchain after teaming up with Stellar. This partnership with Mastercard will allow the company to support and use the blockchain tech, but there are no words whether they also plan to use digital assets.
Token.io will develop Mastercard’s connectivity layer, helping to connect merchants and retailers to financial services. they provide a financial API, TokenOS, as well as a dollar-backed stablecoin on the Stellar (XLM) blockchain, Token X.
IBM announced its plans to further expand its Stellar-based cross border payment system, World Wire.
Co-founder at experio.at announced the release of its Private Beta Wallet on the Stellar Testnet.
The Iranian cryptocurrency has been built on top of the Stellar network and emphasizes the principles of security and reliability. The token will be used for transactions by individuals as well as financial enterprises.
Bafin, Germany’s securities regulator, has given the green light to Bitbond, an online lending platform that operates globally, to issue digital bonds. The fintech is launching a security token offering (STO), with the Bitbond Token (BB1), based on Stellar, aiming to make business lending globally accessible. According to an interview with Handelsblatt, Bitbond CEO and founder announced that their STO has been approved by Bafin and that they are currently in negotiations with several established banks about providing finance.
Rumours
- Iran’s new cryptocurrency (based on Stellar network) might well be a scam (February 20, 2019 update)
In late Jan 2019, news surfaced that a gold-backed cryptocurrency had been created in Iran. Since that time, much fake news has proliferated across the internet about its purpose. Some have claimed that the Iranian government is developing this cryptocurrency. It has even been suggested that it will become the official cryptocurrency of Iran. Neither of these is true.
Social media metrics
The graph above illustrates a great increase in the number of Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. However, the number of Twitter followers prevails.
