Stellar

Stellar is an open-source, decentralized network built to move money quickly and cheaply across different currencies and national borders. It was co-founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim and is overseen by the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation. The project is aimed at connecting banks, payment processors, and individuals who lack reliable access to traditional financial services, using trusted intermediaries called Anchors to bridge conventional money and the digital ledger.

Stellar settles transactions using the Stellar Consensus Protocol, a form of Federated Byzantine Agreement in which each network node selects a set of other nodes it trusts, and agreement among overlapping trust sets produces finality within seconds — the recorded block time is effectively zero minutes. The native token, XLM, is used to pay small transaction fees and to maintain minimum account balances, which together act as a spam-prevention mechanism on the ledger. The network also includes a built-in distributed exchange and a smart-contract platform called Soroban, with all activity anchored to the Stellar blockchain.

Stellar charges a small fee on every transaction; over the trailing 24 hours the network recorded 4,484,477 transactions at an average fee of 0.000362 US dollars each, producing fees of 1,406 US dollars for that period and 34,902 US dollars over the trailing 30 days. Annualizing the 30-day figure produces 424,641 US dollars in fees, and the take rate over that same 30-day window is 100 percent, meaning the full fee amount is retained as protocol revenue rather than distributed to liquidity providers or validators — supply-side revenue for the trailing 30 days is 0.00 US dollars. Fee growth over the last 30 days was 48.16 percent, though the resulting fee yield against current market capitalization remains at 0.006677 percent annualized, reflecting the very low per-transaction cost.