Stellar(XLM)

Stellar was introduced in 2014 by Jed McCaleb (who had earlier created the technology behind the XRP Ledger at Ripple) and Joyce Kim, who were the two cofounders of the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). The SDF describes itself as a nonprofit whose mission is equitable access to the global financial system through blockchain technology. Stellar was built for moving money between currencies, with remittances and financial inclusion as core use cases, the corridors where correspondent banking is expensive and slow.

Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a construction of Federated Byzantine Agreement. Each node chooses its own trusted set of nodes (a quorum set) and a threshold of agreement, and the combinations of nodes that can carry consensus are called quorum slices. Stellar's developer documentation says nodes generally reach consensus and update the ledger every 5 to 7 seconds. On throughput, we have not found a verified live-network figure. What the SDF has published is a goal: it set out to raise Stellar Core's theoretical throughput to 5,000 transactions per second in its 2025 benchmarks, and that is a target, not a measured rate for today's network. The network minimum is 100 stroops per operation (0.00001 XLM). Soroban, Stellar's smart contract platform, went live on mainnet on March 19, 2024, when the SDF announced it along with a $100 million commitment to fund projects using smart contracts. Soroban contracts are WebAssembly programs.

Stellar is often described as an ISO 20022 Registration Management Group (RMG) member. It is not: ISO's official RMG member list, in a copy archived in March 2026, does not include Stellar, the Stellar Development Foundation, or any Stellar-named entity. What we can say about technical alignment is limited. Stellar's SEP-9 defines standard KYC and AML fields and SEP-31 defines cross-border payments between anchors; neither is an ISO 20022 message format, and SEP-9 only borrows ISO encodings for things like language, country, and date. The only ISO 20022 wording we found is in an SDF case study about DCM's Ukraine payment network, which lists an "ISO 20022 compliance-by-default framework" among that application's features. That is an application-layer description of a third-party product built on Stellar, not protocol-level standing, and we found no SDF ISO 20022 messaging product. No cryptocurrency can be certified, because the standard governs message formats, not assets.

Partnership traction is real and easy to date. PayPal announced on June 11, 2025 that PYUSD would come to Stellar pending approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services, and the SDF announced on September 18, 2025 that PYUSD was live on the network. Franklin Templeton's OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (BENJI) launched on Stellar in 2021 and, per an SDF and Franklin Templeton announcement, represented over $650 million as of April 2026, the second-largest tokenized real-world asset on Stellar by value. Societe Generale-FORGE announced on February 20, 2025 that it was launching its EUR stablecoin EURCV on Stellar, which it positions as compliant with the EU's MiCA framework. The SDF announced in October 2024 that Stellar was joining the Mastercard Crypto Credential ecosystem. At Meridian 2025, Mercado Bitcoin announced plans to issue $200 million of tokenized fixed income and equity instruments on Stellar. The SDF's own quarterly reports state two different measures: "$4.2B in quarterly RWA payment volume" for Q2 2025 and cross-border RWA payments at "an all-time high of $5.4B" for Q3 2025. Both are the foundation's self-reported figures, and the wording differs, so they are not a like-for-like trend.

The 2025 story was about institutional on-ramps and performance work. Protocol 23, which the SDF's upgrade page dates to September 3, 2025, added parallel processing of smart contract transactions (CAP-0063) and configurable consensus timing parameters (CAP-0070). Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange, announced a partnership in which the SDF made a direct investment in Archax to help bring tokenized real-world assets to Stellar.

Watch for Soroban activity to grow. The smart contract platform is live, and the SDF reports rising smart-contract use, but the ecosystem is still early. Also watch PYUSD volume on Stellar versus other networks, and whether more fintechs choose Stellar for stablecoin issuance. On September 22, 2026, BVNK, which Mastercard completed acquiring on August 3, 2026 according to BVNK, announced a Stellar integration that is live for its enterprise customers in 130+ countries. That is a payments-infrastructure integration, not a certification of any ISO 20022 standing.