Stellar focuses on micro-payments

First thing first: we moved away from Ethereum to Stellar because we could.

Irene Energy is a green electricity supplier that uses blockchain to give consumers complete visibility over which producers their electricity spending goes to. We leverage blockchain for its transparency and immutability properties: thanks to which, our consumers have access to a public and incorruptible proof of who exactly they bought their electricity from.

We didn’t need the complete programming flexibility that Ethereum provides — and that Stellar doesn’t provide. We didn’t need any smart contracts — other than a crowd-sale feature. On the contrary, the ability to execute micropayments was exactly what we were after. And this turns out to be precisely what Stellar was designed to facilitate in the first place.

2. Stellar is an energy-efficient blockchain

Again, Irene Energy is a green electricity supplier. Using a technology that consumes nearly as much as a country such as Ireland, would have been in contradiction to our most fundamental values.

Stellar, on the other hand, is notoriously energy-efficient.

3. Transactions on Stellar costs a fraction of the price, takes a fraction of the time — and are still public

A transaction on Stellar cost around 0.01% of what it costs on Ethereum… and takes a few seconds compared to between 3min and far too many hours.

Granted, the Ethereum team is working on moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. But with its Byzantine Consensus (which is neither proof-of-work or proof-of-stake), Stellar is already there. And because Irene Energy is planning on launching relatively soon in Europe — and nearly straight after to the United States — we perceived waiting for an Ethereum hypothetical improvement to be an unnecessary risk.

Finally, the off-chain solutions that are currently working on solving Ethereum scalability issue (such as microRaiden) are precisely that: off-chain. Whereas Irene Energy needs to leverage the public property of the blockchain for its core value propositions.

4. Stellar is a truly KYC/AML compliant blockchain

This is arguably one of our favourite differentiating factor between Stellar and Ethereum.

On Stellar, token-issuers have the option to restrict the addresses which can hold their token to the ones that have successfully passed a thorough KYC/AML screening.

Here, the difference with Ethereum is that this is not only true during the issuance phase (primary market): this is also true on the secondary market. Throughout the entire life of the token, only KYC/AML approved addresses will be able to hold, buy and sell Irene Energy’s token.

What’s more: in accordance with established financial regulations, accounts that have been proven to be held by terrorist organizations can be frozen. This is not the case of an Ethereum address holding a ERC-20 token.

5. Stellar has a built-in distributed exchange

Another advantage of Stellar over Ethereum is that Stellar has a built-in distributed exchange. From day-1, an Stellar-issued token is therefore tradable. Token-buyers are not hostages of the ability of token-issuers to find an exchange upon which to list their tokens.

6. An efficient and more “traditional” crowd-sale process

Finally, we also like the process of conducting a ICO on Stellar. Exit the anonymous and somewhat scary Ethereum address to which you are asked to send funds — hoping it is indeed a crowd-sale address and not the private address of a hacker who would have hacked the ICO website.

On Stellar, the token-buyer simply hits a standing sell order that the token-issuer has put on the Stellar distributed exchange. The same way he/she would for an already-listed stock on a stock market.

Such a process has another hidden advantage: unlike on Ethereum (where the selling price in ETH is written in the crowd-sale smart contract — and therefore not modifiable), the token-issuer can “re-strike” his selling order every day to reflect the current XLM/fiat currency exchange rate. That way, throughout the ICO, buyers are guaranteed to by their tokens at roughly the same price (in fiat currency).

The Irene team

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