A Stellar Landing: We\’re Listing Lumens!

Have you ever tried to transfer money via your bank account? Chances are that you’re familiar with the terms NEFT, IMPS and RTGS. But, there’s one major limitation to all of them. Each of these transfers is an INR-INR exchange. What if you had a network that made it possible for you to transfer money instantly, across both digital and fiat currencies? Meet Stellar.

Stellar makes it possible to create, send and trade digital representations of all forms of money — dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything. It’s specifically designed to make traditional forms of money — the money people have been spending and saving for centuries — more useful and accessible.

The Stellar network launched in 2015. Since then it’s processed more than 450 million operations made by over 4 million individual accounts.

What you can do with Stellar

When you deposit your INR into the network, you create a digital token, representing the same value of those rupees on Stellar. This 1:1 relationship means that when people hold a rupee token, they can treat them just like traditional money.

This sounds pretty standard. But this 1:1 relationship holds massive potential. No matter where the tokens are, their underlying rupees have not moved at all — meaning no third-party needs to be involved. Using Stellar also means the individuals holding the tokens can be located anywhere, and still trade them however they please. The Stellar network makes money borderless.

For a Few Lumens More

In the Stellar team’s own words:

The need for lumens arose out of the fundamental design of Stellar’s ledger system. Simply put, it’s too easy to use. Without some nominal barrier or cost, the ledger could become filled with spam or nonsense, or used as a kind of arbitrary database system.

(Emphasis ours)

This feels apt.

Stellar charges a nominal fee for every transaction, as well as a minimum balance for every user. This introduces a little friction, and helps weed out potential junk transactions.

But they faced a problem. Using an existing currency would mean it favoured some users instead of being the universal solution they envisioned. Instead, they created the Lumen, a token meant only to meet network requirements.

The Stellar Lumen is one of the best-performing altcoins of the last five years with a market cap of just over $1 billion. Unlike Bitcoin or Ether, lumens aren’t mined or awarded by the protocol over time. Instead, 100 billion lumens were created when the Stellar network went live, with about 50% being taken out of circulation since.

Nearly 20 billion lumens are out in the open market, and as of today, you can buy some of those Lumens right here on ZebPay!