We also, today, show tokens for Euros, Philippine Pesos, Nigerian Naira, Chinese Yuan, Hong Kong Dollar, and the British Pound, and we’ll add in-app deposits/withdrawals for these as soon as their issuers support our standards. We anticipate a full suite of forex stablecoins in the coming months: we will be a “local” exchange for many countries that currently have nothing.

On the crypto side, the most important coins are already in place, BTC, ETH, and so on, and we’ll be adding deep into the coinmarketcap top n very soon. We have listings comparable to many legacy exchanges, and we’ll far exceed them in the near future. The “X” in StellarX might seem like a nod to “exchange”, but we see it as the algebraic x. Anything. Anyone. Anywhere. That’s the platform we’ve got.

Our full potential, however, is so far unrealized: StellarX will one day have bonds, stocks, real estate, commodities, and so on all side-by-side with essential currencies, but these new assets take time and the right protocol to digitize. This leads me to our final founding value, a subtle and little-understood one, but really the most important thing that StellarX offers, because without it no exchange can become the world’s marketplace:

Our market is transparent

Everything meaningful that happens on StellarX is on-chain, and so yeah the world can see it. But here I mean “transparent” in a larger sense, both for users and, crucially, for token issuers. Because both must be informed for a market to flourish.

transparency for traders : Our tokens behave in an expected manner. There are no smart contracts to unravel ownership, or to catastrophically fail. Tokenization is handled at the protocol layer from simple templates. Important features are set as flags, not in custom code.

: Our tokens behave in an expected manner. There are no smart contracts to unravel ownership, or to catastrophically fail. Tokenization is handled at the protocol layer from simple templates. Important features are set as flags, not in custom code. transparency for issuers: if you so choose, you can see who your customers are and confirm their identity before they interact with your token.

We realize nobody really wants to think about compliance — it’s probably blockchain’s least sexy word — but how a platform enables or discourages it has massive effects, especially as newer and more interesting types of assets get digitized. Whether you find it wrong or not, it’s just a legal fact that banks, corporations, and municipalities have to know who holds their credit, their stock, and their bonds.

Yet almost every other platform defies this basic truth. Thus Gemini, in order to launch their big dollar stablecoin, had to write the underlying Ethereum contract to allow them to:

generate an infinite amount of tokens, and every 48 hours…totally change the implementation, making all tokens non-transferable or pretty much anything else

This is blockchain fine-print that hurts both the token holders and the issuer. It’s unfair to traders to have to sort out ownership risk via a code review.

Stellar has a better way. We get that KYC is a thing in the world. We also understand that smart contracts are the wrong place to bury fundamental information. We allow issuers — if they so require — to impose KYC requirements before a person can trade their token. And we give holders human-readable information about what they own, so they can make decisions for themselves.

To fulfill the promise of a universal platform, information has to flow freely between holders and issuers. No one is going to issue stock or whatever to the blockchain otherwise.