Launched in 2014, the XLM cryptocurrency has surged nearly 20% in the past 24 hours and is currently trading at $0.2642 according to data from CryptoCompare. Developed initially using the Ripple protocol with guidance from Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Ripple and founder of the now defunct crypto exchange Mt.Gox, the XLM token has now been listed on OKCoin, a leading digital asset trading platform that provides crypto-to-fiat spot trading.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) 24-Hour Price Chart via CryptoCompare

As the Ripple company’s XRP token continues to surge, XLM and most other major cryptocurrencies such as the Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson-backed cardano (ADA) are also in the green.

InterStellar

While it’s possible that XLM’s rally may be influenced by the recent positive crypto market sentiment created by XRP, there may be other factors involved in its significant price increase. On September 10th, Chain, Inc., the developer of a cloud blockchain financial infrastructure, was acquired by the Lightyear Corporation, a Stellar Development Foundation-backed “commercial entity.”

As mentioned in a Medium blog post related to the announcement, the Chain and Lightyear brands will now be collectively referred to InterStellar. Describing the potential impact of this merger, InterStellar’s blog reads:

The merger brings Chain’s enterprise products and customer base to Stellar’s global public ledger, creating an end-to-end solution that will enable organizations to issue, exchange, and manage assets on a highly-scalable public network.

Sequence, Chain’s proprietary cloud-based ledger, will enable organizations to track their transactions – which will involve cryptocurrency transfers between the Stellar network and various other private (or permissioned) ledgers.

1 Million Stellar Wallets

Notably, on August 27th, a new Stellar milestone was reached as over 1 million accounts have now been created on the crypto platform’s ledger. As CryptoGlobe covered, the Waves platform, a blockchain-based crypto network that allows users to issue their own tokens, also announced that 1 million Waves multi-currency crypto wallets have now been created.

While these are all positive developments, many blockchain industry influencers and developers such as Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, have repeatedly cautioned that speculative digital currency investors often overreact to “good news.”

When cryptocurrency prices had reached record-level highs, Buterin had questioned whether blockchain-based digital assets had been given more credit than they deserved, given the “really immature” state of their development.

In fact, the Russian-Canadian programmer and writer had even said cryptocurrency prices could potentially drop to “near zero” value due to the highly unpredictable nature of crypto assets – which many still consider to be an experiment.