The cryptocurrency market is slowly picking up again after a pretty poor performance this year, and is having a positive effect on all crypto coins. However, one that has really stood out is Stellar , which continues to perform well. It is flourishing so much, that it has been pipped as being one of the top 5 cryptocurrencies. According to coinmarketcap, Stellar has a market capital of $6,405,493,222 with a trade price of $0.344929. The recent bull run is likely to be down to some recent partnerships. Just a few days ago XLM, partnered with Novatti Group, which is a go-to global fintech and systems integration provider. They have also partnered with IBM, and in the past with the Kin Foundation. Stellar, like Ripple is also branded as a distributed payment technology that is completely open source. It shares the same founder AS Ripple, Jed McCaleb, and initially used the same protocol. It was originally designed to eliminate the connectivity problems that were encountered between financial institutions, whilst aiming to reduce the cost and time of transaction at the same time. The Stellar technology creates a nexus between banks, payment tools and people and the protocol makes it incredibly easy to achieve multinational fund and asset transfer in a reliable, quick and cheap manner. We spoke earlier about the influences that Stellar has, but just who are these? We’ll start with the obvious, Jed McCaleb. He has long worked in the cryptocurrency market, creating Ripple, eDonkey, Mt.Gox, and the Overnet network. Another is David Mazieres, who is the Chief Scientist at the Stellar Development Foundation. He is highly qualified, having worked as a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and worked as a researcher on Distribued System and Operating Systems, whilst placing focus on security. He has received many awards for his work, including the MIT Sprowls best thesis in computer science award, Oakland distinguished paper award, just to name a couple.