Stellar – the most transparent cryptocurrency
Experienced traders often call Stellar "a better version of Ripple" due to zero control from developers' side. Developers do their best to provide stable operation of the system, but they have never interfered with users' activity. Stellar belongs to a non-commercial organization and is based on a proprietary open source protocol.
What's more, there is a controlling foundation which provides complete transparency of all monetary flows inside Stellar system. Don't worry, your operations will never be disclosed to anybody else, but people which bad intentions will be quickly identified and blocked.
About 30% of Stellar coins which are also called "Lumens" belongs to non-profit organizations and individuals who are obliged to not sell the coins within next 5 years. Each of them signed a document about that. These coins are reserved for various administrative operations and other purposes we are not sure about.
Features and advantages of Stellar
Stellar coins are called Lumens of XLM. These are just coins developed for financial operations — one cannot mine them, for instance, because all coins are issued. To prevent devaluation and scam attacks there is an entry threshold level of 20 XLM. Considering, that 1 Lumen costs only 0,33 USD (the end of February, 2018) this requirement does not seem too tough.
The system of Stellar is fully decentralized. Due to open source code it is attractive for developers too.
Stellar developers did incredibly good job and managed to achieve very fast transaction speed which is below 5 seconds. Comparing to Bitcoin and actually to any other cryptocurrency this is an unbeatable advantage of Stellar.
Another plus of Stellar is that it is a convenient intermediary tool allowing to quickly convert one coin to another. Stellar system and wallet allows you to upload it with BTC, LTC and nearly every existing cryptocurrency. The same is about fiat currencies.
The system is based on huge number of small autonomous hubs preventing data leakage. Scammers can try to attack this system, but their attempts will hardly pay back. It is worth hacking anything only if there is chance to steal good money, isn't it? Therefore computer geniuses are not interested in hacking fully decentralized systems.
At the website (stellar.org) you can get comprehensive information about the project which is really helpful especially if you are a new person in all these crypto things.
Speaking about transaction commission we should state that Stellar has the lowest fee — 0.0001 XLM per operation which is far less than 1 cent! There is virtually no commission at all as you see.
Where to buy Stellar
As we said before Lumens are not available for mining, you can only buy them for USD, EUR or other money. Stellar coins are available at Coinbase, CoinMama, BitPand and few more services. Unfortunately, XLM is not presented at Poloniex and some other most popular exchanges. The reason is unclear, since Stellar is quite a demanded cryptocurrency with good history.
It is quite possible that we will see Stellar at Poloniex soon, though. During 3 last years Stellar coins were not promoted properly and it was nearly impossible to exchange them into something but USD and BTC. What's more, XLM was not presented nearly anywhere at all!
Now the situation has changed. Rebranding included huge investments and good-looking marketing campaign resulted into appearance of Stellar into a great number of exchange services.
The coin value in 2014 was only 0,06 USD, and in the beginning of 2018 it was 0,7 USD already!
The token displays gradual growth. There is a very interesting thing about Stellar: it did not fall down together with Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies in January, 2018. What does it mean? Probably it means that Stellar goes its own way and does not depend on any crypto projects.
Outlook
After Stellar demonstrated outstanding stability during the fall of other cryptocurrencies a lot of traders came to the conclusion that this coin is something different indeed. Its exchange rate reduced, but only a bit and in February, 2018 it has been growing all the time.
Traders discuss Stellar in online forums, and quite often one can see their predictions that Lumen value will exceed $10 during 2018. Seems that these opinions are expressed by experienced traders who know the subject really well. From the other hand it can be a part of new marketing campaign. Who knows? We will see by the end of 2018.
Conclusion
Let's be honest and admit that Stellar will hardly become the most popular cryptocurrency on market. It will not become a top-10 coin either, at least not this year. But to invest into an asset you do not need it to be on its best point, otherwise how will you earn on it?
Rebranding and intensive development of Stellar certainly look good and attract traders. If you are looking for an asset with moderate risk to invest it would be a good idea to select XML.
We don't recommend you to expect quick results and fast profit from investment into Stellar coins. XML will rather grow gradually during entire 2018 and the forecast stating that Lumen value can exceed $10 by the end of the year does not look objective. It rather resembles an attempt to create hype around the coin and to attract big number of new investors in a short period of time.
Now Stellar developers should keep on working hard. They need to place it to main exchange services such as Poloniex, Gemini, Cex.io and others. It's great to see XML at Coinbase which is also incredibly popular, but traders want XML to be available at other exchanges too.
To sum up, Stellar is a transparent system worth considering regardless of your experience and knowledge in the domain of cryptocurrencies. Now it is a good time to invest in Stellar.
