Stellar(XLM)

Stellar launched in 2014, founded by Jed McCaleb (who also co-created the XRP Ledger) and Joyce Kim. The Stellar Development Foundation, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, oversees the protocol. Stellar was built to connect financial institutions, payment systems, and people, with a particular focus on remittances and underbanked populations. If XRP targets the top of the banking food chain, Stellar targets the wider base.

Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a variant of Federated Byzantine Agreement. Nodes choose their own trust sets (called "quorum slices"), and consensus emerges from overlapping trust rather than a single validator list. Ledgers close every 5 seconds, though the SDF is targeting 2.5-second close times through Protocol 23, which introduced parallel transaction processing in late 2025. Current throughput sits around 1,000 to 2,000 TPS, with a target of 5,000 TPS. The base fee is 0.00001 XLM, roughly $0.00012. Soroban, Stellar's smart contract platform, went live on mainnet in February 2024. Built on Rust and WebAssembly, Soroban fees typically run a few cents per transaction. The SDF launched a $100 million fund to drive Soroban adoption.

Stellar is an RMG member, joining in 2020 alongside Ripple. The network natively carries ISO 20022-structured data in its transactions, so it can transmit remittance information and compliance details in the format banks require. The SDF has been explicit that Stellar is "compatible at the messaging level" rather than claiming any formal certification, which is the honest framing. Between RMG membership and native message formatting, Stellar's ISO 20022 connection is as strong as Ripple's from a technical standpoint.

Partnership traction is real and getting more tangible. PayPal launched its PYUSD stablecoin on Stellar in June 2025, choosing the network for its speed and cost profile. Franklin Templeton has over $270 million of its OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund tokenized on Stellar. Societe Generale-FORGE integrated its EUR-backed stablecoin (EURCV) onto Stellar for MiCA compliance. Mastercard brought Stellar into its Crypto Credential ecosystem in October 2024. Mercado Bitcoin announced plans to issue $200 million in tokenized fixed income on the network. Over 500 anchors issue fiat-backed tokens on Stellar. By Q2 2025, the network had processed $4 billion in real-world asset payments in a single quarter.

The 2025 story was about institutional on-ramps. Protocol 23 brought multi-threaded smart contract execution. PYUSD on Stellar gave the network its highest-profile stablecoin integration. The SDF re-established a $100 million adoption fund for Soroban developers. The Archax partnership, with the UK-regulated digital asset exchange integrating Stellar for RWA tokenization, opened a European corridor.

Watch for Soroban DeFi activity to grow. The smart contract platform is live but still early in ecosystem buildout. If Soroban can attract meaningful TVL and developer activity, it changes Stellar from a pure payments rail into a programmable finance platform. Also watch PYUSD volume on Stellar versus Ethereum, and whether more fintechs choose Stellar for stablecoin issuance.