By By Ken Hanly Jan 5, 2018 in Technology What could become the hottest digital coin of 2018 climbed in price from Friday December 29th 2017 more than 65 percent to become the 8th largest cryptocoin by capitalization on Tuesday January 2nd with a market cap of $10 billion. Stellar Wikipedia describes the design of Stellar as follows: Stellar is an open-source protocol for exchanging money. Servers run a software implementation of the protocol, and use the Internet to connect to and communicate with other Stellar servers, forming a global value exchange network. Each server stores a record of all “accounts” on the network. These records are stored in a database called the “ledger”. Servers propose changes to the ledger by proposing “transactions”, which move accounts from one state to another by spending the account’s balance or changing a property of the account. All of the servers come to agreement on which set of transactions to apply to the current ledger through a process called “consensus”. The consensus process happens at a regular interval, typically every 2 to 4 seconds. This keeps each server’s copy of the ledger in sync and identical. At its launch The official name of the coin associated with Stellar is lumen, XLM. Real world applications of Stellar Several nonprofit organizations and businesses are using Stellar for their financial infrastructure particularly in the developing world The Praekelt Foundation, has integrated Stellar into Yumi that is an open-source messaging app that allows young girls in sub-Saharan Africa to save money on airtime credits. Another example is Oradian, a cloud-based banking software company, that is planning to use Stellar to connect microfinance institutions in Nigeria. In December of last year Stellar announced more partnerships in the Philippines, India and West Africa. In October of 2017, Stellar announced it had partnered with IBM to increase the speed of global payments. Consulting firm Deloitte is also a partner. Stellar's transaction speed is very fast In contrast to coins such as bitcoin, Jed McCaleb McCaleb is an American programmer. He is widely known for creating peer-to-peer technologies such as He was also involved with the large Japanese bitcoin exchange In 2011 McCaleb founded another company Ripple that also focuses on payments and rose considerably in value last year. As a recent McCaleb is now focused on Stellar. On the same day, the price rose 17.5 percent to 56.4 cents. Stellar is an open-source protocol for value exchange. It was founded in 2014 led by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim with a number of board members. The protocol is supported by the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation.Wikipedia describes the design of Stellar as follows:At its launch Stellar was based on Ripple. However, the protocol was later updated with a new consensus algorithm. The code for the new algorithm was released in April of 2015The official name of the coin associated with Stellar is lumen, XLM.Several nonprofit organizations and businesses are using Stellar for their financial infrastructure particularly in the developing worldThe Praekelt Foundation, has integrated Stellar into Yumi that is an open-source messaging app that allows young girls in sub-Saharan Africa to save money on airtime credits.Another example is Oradian, a cloud-based banking software company, that is planning to use Stellar to connect microfinance institutions in Nigeria.In December of last year Stellar announced more partnerships in the Philippines, India and West Africa.In October of 2017, Stellar announced it had partnered with IBM to increase the speed of global payments. Consulting firm Deloitte is also a partner.In contrast to coins such as bitcoin, transactions through Stellar take only two to five seconds. Users can quickly exchange government-backed fiat currencies such as U.S. dollars into Euros and vice versa.McCaleb is an American programmer. He is widely known for creating peer-to-peer technologies such as eDonkey used for sharing files.He was also involved with the large Japanese bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox but it was later sold to Mark Kapeles. The exchange eventually was closed after many of its bitcoins were stolen and the exchange filed for bankruptcy after scandalously bad if not criminal management problems.In 2011 McCaleb founded another company Ripple that also focuses on payments and rose considerably in value last year. As a recent Digital Journal article reports Ripple is now the second largest cryptocoin in terms of market capitalization. McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 and went on to lead the development of Stellar in 2014. Ripple is also working with financial institutions in South Korea and Japan using the ripple coin XRP.McCaleb is now focused on Stellar. The Stellar website claims that it operates on a non-profit basis. It covers operating costs through selling some of its digital currency holdings and through donations. More about Stellar crytocoin, cryptocurrencies, cryptocoin market caps Stellar crytocoin cryptocurrencies cryptocoin market ca...