Stellar launched in 2014, founded by Jed McCaleb — who had earlier co-founded Ripple — alongside Joyce Kim, through the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation. It targets cross-border payments and asset issuance (including tokenised real-world assets and stablecoins) similarly to XRP's payments focus, but runs its own distinct consensus mechanism and governance structure under a non-profit rather than a for-profit company.
Category
payments
Consensus mechanism
Stellar Consensus Protocol (federated Byzantine agreement)
Launched
2014
The Stellar Consensus Protocol
Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a form of federated Byzantine agreement in which each node chooses its own set of other nodes it trusts ('quorum slices'), and network-wide agreement emerges from the overlap between those individually chosen trust sets — a different model to both proof-of-work mining and conventional token-weighted proof-of-stake.
Supply history and current use
All XLM were created at genesis; there is no mining or staking issuance. Stellar originally ran an annual 1% inflation mechanism that distributed new XLM to accounts based on votes, but this was removed in a 2019 protocol upgrade after the mechanism was found to be gamed more than it achieved its intended distribution goal — since then, total supply has only decreased, through occasional token burns, never increased.
Stellar is used by a number of payments and remittance companies (including, historically, partnerships involving IBM's World Wire) and has more recently expanded into tokenised asset and stablecoin issuance rails, including support for regulated USDC issuance on its network.
Tokenomics
| circulating-supply | — |
|---|---|
| max-supply | — |
| issuance-model | Fixed total created at genesis; no ongoing mining or staking issuance since the 2019 removal of the annual inflation mechanism |
Last verified: 8 July 2026. before you rely on any figure — live circulating supply and market cap are never published here; check a live tracker.
Risks & criticisms
- Stellar's federated consensus trust model depends on how quorum slices are configured across the network; check current validator/quorum health rather than assuming a fixed guarantee.
- Its value proposition overlaps meaningfully with XRP's in cross-border payments, and adoption metrics for either are worth checking directly rather than assumed.
- As with any payments-focused asset, actual enterprise adoption and settlement volume are the metric that matters most, and these should be verified from current, primary sources.
Where to buy
Related buying guide
→ Stellar — related buying guideFrequently asked questions
Who founded Stellar?
Jed McCaleb, a co-founder of Ripple, founded Stellar in 2014 with Joyce Kim, through the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation.
Does Stellar still pay inflation rewards?
No. The original annual inflation mechanism was removed in a 2019 protocol upgrade; total XLM supply has only decreased since, via occasional burns.
How is Stellar different from XRP?
Both target cross-border payments, but they run independent codebases, consensus mechanisms and organisational structures (a non-profit foundation for Stellar versus Ripple Labs, a for-profit company, for XRP) — they are not the same network.