XLM Retirement Calculator

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 — the corridors where correspondent banking over SWIFT is expensive, slow, and unreliable. 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.