Stellar

Abstract

This chapter presents the Stellar protocol, its native cryptocurrency Lumens, technical details of its underlying operation and its alliance with major industry partners. Stellar is a distributed ledger for exchanging money or tokens using blockchain technology. It aims to facilitate the cross-asset transfer of value at a fraction of a penny. At the genesis block of the Stellar network, 100 billion tokens were created as specified in the protocol. Stellar uses a consensus mechanism known as a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). It offers four features – flexible trust, decentralised control, low latency and asymptotic security – and aims to solve the limitations of Ripple’s Byzantine Agreement (BA) algorithm. Stellar identifies a major limitation in Ripple’s BA algorithm. Stellar is a decentralised currency transfer protocol which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. An agreement in the FBA algorithm is achieved through federated voting.