Stellar – An Ethereum Flipper?

You can’t go a day now without hearing the word “Ethereum”. They even talk about it at Burger King. It’s one of the largest digital assets and has made people a LOT of money. I love Ethereum, but it’s not perfect, and there’s a lot of competition out there that could potentially topple it one day.

A possible Ethereum killer? Stellar

The current financial infrastructure is pretty fragmented. There’s dozens of different payment systems such as Paypal, Stripe, Cash App, Venmo, etc. Between the dozens of different currencies and payment systems, you can imagine that moving money between them can be slow – and also expensive.

Enter Stellar. The Stellar Network ($XLM) hopes to solve this expensive problem. The Stellar network is a decentralized network, which means no person or company can just turn it off. Stellar is used for providing fast, cheap payments between people, businesses, and banks. “An open network for storing and moving money” according to their official website.

Stellar is a decentralized and open network that is supported by a non-profit foundation that maintains total neutrality and allows people to move money almost instantly – no matter what bank they use or where they are or – or where they are sending money to.

The Lumen

To help make all of the above, Stellar created the cryptocurrency called Lumen. The Lumen, which can help to solve the problem of using different forms of currency. A good example would be this: You run a small business in Chicago, Il and you need to pay a vendor that’s in South Korea. Your business bank account uses US Dollars and the vendor uses South Korean Won. You could send money via Western Union International Money Transfer (for instance), but that is pretty slow. The money goes through a lot of hands before it gets to it’s destination and that takes quite a few days usually. Not to mention it get’s expensive; there are fees pretty much at every stop between Chicago and South Korea. As fees stack up, you can imagine that your small business suffers on the back-end over time as you continue sending and receiving money this way.

Stellar has a decentralized exchange baked right in to help combat this. It can route a payment right from you in Chicago to your vendor in South Korea and uses Lumens as a channel; by converting the US dollars into Lumens and then converting the Lumens into South Korean Won.

It does all of this within literal seconds – and the fee is a microscopic $0.0002. Pretty beneficial right?
So, to wrap things up I think Stellar is pretty promising. A decentralized network that provides a secure, cheap, and super fast way of sending money on a global scale is great. I think that it solves a real world problem that can be quite annoying or even crippling for some people and businesses – and I think that’s what we all want.

Should you buy $XLM?

Here’s a quick disclaimer: I am in NO way giving financial advice. Whether you choose to use Stellar or to invest in Stellar is up to you. My goal is to just provide some fairly high-level information in a down-to-Earth language that I hope is easy to understand. You can read more about Stellar on their website at Stellar.org

I am in the process of learning more about cryptocurrency and this is my way of trying to teach myself in the process. I thought it only fair to try my best to pass along the knowledge that I gain. With any luck at all, you gained something from this! If you did benefit from this, please feel free to share this article on your social networks and/or reach out on Twitter and say thanks so that I know what I am doing is not a waste of our time!

My original blog post is here:

https://tommythetechie.com/stellar-an-ethereum-flipper/