The development team has announced that Stellar’s decentralized exchange, SDEX, will be further worked upon in the coming year. The trading platform is said to offer a host of features, including blockchain-based atomic swaps, low fees and even user control over private keys.

The second goal of Stellar’s roadmap involves the Lightning Network, usually only associated with Bitcoin. Even though XLM can currently handle transactions faster and cheaper than bitcoin, alternative scaling strategies will only help the network further.

Stellar’s blog post states that the team also hopes to achieve greater resilience, security and ecosystem support in 2018.

Stripe, the payment processing company headquartered in California, recently released a blog post announcing that they would no longer offer the option of payments in bitcoin after April 23, 2018. The company cited commonly known issues with the cryptocurrency, including long transaction confirmation times and high fees. In a later comment picked up on the Indie Hackers forum, Stripe’s founder, Patrick Collison, stated that the payment platform may look into incorporating bitcoin’s future-scaling solution, Lightning Network, once fully released.

Meanwhile, Stripe’s blog post also revealed that the company is still committed to cryptocurrencies and indicated that alternative coins such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin may be added. A direct reference to Stellar was also made, highlighting that the company’s large investment in the cryptocurrency platform was probably motivated by an intention to add it as a payment method in the near future.

Following Stripe’s announcement of a possible Stellar inclusion, the price of XLM jumped over 21 percent to around $0.59. With Stripe being the world’s third largest payment gateway, the integration of Stellar is likely to boost the cryptocurrency’s popularity.