Here are 8 reasons why we think Stellar shines:

1. Stellar’s consensus model is designed for the real world

Authored by Stanford Professor David Mazieres, the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) closely matches real-life business arrangements. Inspired by the architecture of the internet, the SCP uses a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) model to achieve decentralized consensus. That means that there is no gatekeeper and no central authority — anyone can participate in the Stellar universe.

Just like in the real world, each network participant chooses who they want to trust for information. Participants in a transaction do not need the entire network to agree for a transaction to be validated, just the other members it cares about. Each participant, and the ones it trusts, make up what’s called a “quorum slice”. Participants can be members of multiple slices, and any overlapping slices are called “quorum intersections”. These intersections result in a stable and secure system-wide consensus.

2. Transferring money should be as easy as sending an email

Stellar’s Federation Protocol maps Stellar addresses to account IDs. Depending on your use case, instead of using a long, hard-to-remember alphanumeric string as your address, you could use your email address or other short alias. The advantages of the Federation Protocol versus something such as the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is that it is free, while ENS is not.

It isn’t hard to envision a time when email providers are integrated with Stellar, automatically connecting a wallet address to each user’s email. Imagine the simplicity and affordability when a person in one country could send money across the world to someone with nothing more than their email address!

3. Security

“If the creator of Solidity, Gavin Wood, cannot write a secure multisig wallet in Solidity, pretty much confirms Ethereum is hacker paradise.” — Charlie Lee, Founder of Litecoin

The majority of blockchain businesses do not require complex smart contracts — so why expose them to increased risks? When dealing with large enterprise businesses, it is imperative that all precautions are taken to secure transactions. Stellar limits the attack-surface available to bad actors by not having a Turing-complete system. For a payment system and means of exchange, Stellar provides broad functionality while curtailing threats by design.

4. Liquidity

Access to capital and liquidity are major challenges to fundraising and that brings me to my fourth reason Stellar is great.

New tokens are being launched every day. Each new token brings additional competition for exchange placement — not to mention increasing costs to get listed. Without significant backing, it’s very likely many tokens will not be able to afford to be listed on a exchange. Without being listed on an exchange, it’s very difficult to find true liquidity. We believe that no one should be stopped from being able to bring their idea to market.

While MAD will be listed on more traditional public exchanges, Stellar’s system has its own decentralized exchange built in. This means tokens can be traded the moment they are created. Stellar’s decentralized exchange will lead to a more equitable ecosystem overall.

5. Documentation & Support

In the words of one of one of our senior developers, “Working with the Stellar documentation has been stellar!”

Stellar’s documentation and community support are amazing. The docs are clear, and easy to understand. They’re reminiscent of Stripe’s documentation — which shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Stripe’s former CTO sits on Stellar’s Board. Stellar’s Slack channels are full of Stellar developers and other members of the community, who hold lively discussions and are always ready to help. This helps make trouble-shooting a breeze, and explains why some of the largest banks and financial institutions in the world are implementing solutions based on Stellar.

6. The Right Focus

Since the start, Stellar has been singularly focused on its technology. It has an amazing combination of low fees, high performance and a laser focus on continual improvement. Transaction fees are only charged to prevent denial of service attacks, and are redistributed based on stakeholder voting.

In tests with Barclays, Deloitte, and IBM, Stellar has been proven to safely handle up to 1,000 operations per second. Additionally confirmation times currently average 3–5 seconds. The team is actively working on improvements to push this scalability even further, which means this number is likely to increase going forward. When you consider MAD’s focus on ad tech, scalability and performance are paramount. Their commitment to providing a robust, secure and functioning distributed ledger proves that Stellar does everything a modern blockchain should.

Stellar is also committed to partnering with technologies that allow projects like ours to focus on solutions. For example, Stellar is partnering with Blockdaemon, also a MAD partner and the first nodes-as-a-service platform specifically engineered for blockchain infrastructure. Tools like Blockdaemon will allow our team to focus on leveraging Stellar’s technology to solve ad tech problems, and rest easy that our infrastructure can be easily deployed and managed.

7. The Stellar Team

No team looks as impressive as Stellar’s (can you tell we really like Stellar?). Its co-founder, Jed McCaleb, pioneered p2p file sharing, created the first bitcoin exchange and co-founded Ripple. The list of team members, board members, and advisors includes some of blockchains biggest pioneers — from Greg Brockman to Sam Altman, Dan Kaminsky, Patrick Collison, Keith Rabois, and many others. Stellar has brought together the best minds in fintech, security and distributed systems — and their passion shows in the product they’ve created together.

8. Stellar’s Mission

Stellar aims to promote global financial access and is leading the pack when it comes to cutting-edge innovation. While other blockchains are years from having working solutions to today’s problems, Stellar excels.