What is XLM

Stellar is a cryptocurrency and open source protocol for value exchange founded in early 2014 with a similar structure to that of the competing blockchain solution, XRP. Stellar claims to be platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people. Stellar aims to achieve this through its completely decentralized consensus platform. It is designed to support any type of currency and has a built in decentralized exchange that can be used to trade any type of currency or asset. The Stellar ledger records all the balances and transactions belonging to every account on the network. A complete copy of the Stellar ledger is then hosted on each server that runs the open source Stellar software. These servers form the decentralized Stellar network. To verify the network these servers then sync and validate the ledger through process known as consensus.