Stellar Lumens Background

Stellar Lumens is closing in on it’s 4th birthday as per the total span of its coinmarketcap chart. It is an open-sourced, distributed payments infrastructure. It exists because humanity needs “a worldwide financial network open to anyone.” This well developed projects sits in the top 10 on coinmarketcap. It’s always rumoured to be close to a Coinbase listing. It is sometimes dismissed as a Ripple fork but, while untrue, that’s an argument for another time! Stellar reached it’s all time high of $0.85 in January 2018. It is currently trading at $0.25.

Stellar Lumens Mission

The Stellar Lumens Project is primarily focused on narrowing the gap between blockchain and the traditional financial world. The ability to settle transactions quickly without the need for dispute resolution is the obvious USP. Using traditional methods it can take 5-7 working days to settle some inter-bank transfers. These delays ultimately affect end users. The presence of tools to reduce this are appealing to financial enterprises. They also have obvious appeal to anyone who needs to transfer funds quickly!

Stellar Lumens’ main goal is to become the world’s digital payment rail by connecting people, banks and payment systems. It allows you to transfer money to anyone, anywhere, quickly and securely with a transaction cost of less than a penny. This fee alone may put Western Union out of the game.

Stellar Lumens Partners

What has particularly impressed me in reviewing Stellar Lumens ahead of it’s 4th birthday is it’s partnerships. It has partnered with a blend of traditional and crypto companies to build projects on it’s blockchain. This is important because the blockchain community is still very small. We need partnerships with big businesses to accelerate adoption, it’s simple!

IBM



IBM are currently working alongside Stellar Lumens producing a stable coin tethered to the US Dollar. A full integration of IBM within the Stellar Lumens project would help to see a surge in the popularity of Stellar Lumens, with such a big name on board, this also gives the prospect of adoption for XLM a big boost too.

Another component of the IBM partnership is the tie-in with the Australian government. They plan to use Stellar’s block-tech to deliver social security welfare while being supported by IBM. This would be a really compelling use case for the viability of cryptocurrency as a government issued item.

Satoshi Pay



Satoshi Pay is old news now, but it is still a working progress and another example of how Stellar Lumens’ versatility allows it to be built into a range of different applications. Moreover, this partnership also sees the introduction of Tempo. The Europe based money transfer company that now uses the Stellar network for cross border payments.

Satoshi Pay’s recent partnership with news outlet the register prompted a giveaway of 1 Million XLM tokens. Stellar Lumens are able to piggyback on the success of other blockchain plays like this. It can be a powerful avenue for growth.

Slice



Real estate is a big game, and has real implications for cryptocurrency too. Slice aim to totally tokenize the real estate industry and gives investors the chance to access opportunities that would be otherwise unavailable with cryptocurrency payments. That is to say it wants to enable you to buy into property using a wallet app! As Slice grows, it could well dominate the US real estate market.

To get a perspective, we value the global real estate market at over $217 trillion and consider $81 trillion of that as investment grade real estate. If Slice, and by extension Stellar Lumens, can make inroads here there will be a lot of value in the network. The prospect of paying for property investments with a cryptocurrency might seem outlandish but it might just work!

Chynge

Singapore-based fintech startup, Chynge has announced that it is launching an all-new decentralized remittance platform that will allow users to make instant, free and safe money transfers across borders. Leveraging on blockchain technology, Chynge’s platform aims to encourage financial inclusion in parts of the world where access to traditional banking services are limited.

Chynge operates on the Stellar Lumens platform. Adoption focuses on non-traditional geographic areas which gives Stellar Lumens a presence it would be unlikely to have otherwise. This is a recurring aspect of Stellar Lumens partnerships and bodes well for the future.

Deloitte

The consultancy giant is a notable partner for a cryptocurrency project. They have integrated with the Stellar network to build a revolutionary cross-border payments application. Launched at the Consensus conference in New York in May 2016, the Deloitte Digital Bank is now available to power instant payments across borders.

Deloitte developed an offering to serve two customer segments: consumers and businesses. Some of the working prototypes already developed allow consumers use a custom built mobile application (available on iOS). With the mobile app, users create an account by scanning their driver’s license and can make instant peer-to-peer payments. All transactions resolve in around 5 seconds.