Created by Ripple’s co-founder Jed McCaleb, Stellar focuses on improving the initial concept of a decentralized protocol for digital to fiat currency transfers across borders. It is an open-source blockchain payment protocol launched in 2014 that facilitates fast, cross-border transactions by digitally representing any form of money, Dollar, Baht or Ether, while minimizing time and transfer costs. Stellar Lumen(XLM), the native cryptocurrency of Stellar, is used for transactions within the ecosystem.
Advantages of Stellar
Stellar’s advantages over other protocols include:
- Real-time settlements – Transactions are verified within two to five seconds.
- Low Fees – The transaction cost of Stellar is 0.00001 lumens per transaction.
- Cross-border payments – Stellar allows issueless transactions across countries.
- Multi-currency support – Stellar uses an anchor system to support multiple currencies and works by accepting any money for a deposit and a loan issued in the currency you require.
Stellar payment solutions
Cross-border payments
The problems with traditional B2B payments in terms of money and time are resolved through the cross-border payment solution on Stellar. The platform enables financial institutions to do the same transaction in minutes for pennies on the dollar and do away with expensive banking fees and currency rates.
Stellar provides on-ramps and off-ramps to the world’s currencies by combining the possibility of a frictionless blockchain-based payment channel with a local partner. These regional partners—also known as anchors—are employed to relocate anchors on the stellar network while disbursing and receiving local fiat currency.
Trade Finance
Trade finance is an umbrella term involving the financial instruments and products companies and banks use to facilitate international trade and commerce. It enables importers and exporters to transact business through trade easily. Stellar blockchain seamlessly facilitates trade finance by connecting global financial institutions and drastically reduces cross-border transactions’ time and cost.
Remittances
Stellar facilitates cross-border remittance payments without intermediaries, offering various benefits like quick transactions, a trusted gateway, real-time transactions, varied currency support, traceable transactions, and more.
Micropayments
You can leverage the micropayments services of Stellar and power your payments or transactions of any size on Stellar using its flat and low charges with fast and secure transactions.
Conclusion
Traditional payment systems often have limitations of slow payment processing, transparency issues and low security. Unpredictable currency conversion rates are occasionally a part of international payments. Furthermore, outdated operational systems make it much more difficult to carry out payment activities. As such, Stellar was introduced to tackle the challenges of the traditional payment methods and provide a low-cost, secure and transparent payment system. It facilitates peer-to-peer transactions and borderless payments without intermediary intervention, thus helping the unbanked access financial services.
