About

Stellar is a Layer-1 blockchain that allows “developers to create applications, issue assets, and connect to existing financial rails.” Unlike most blockchains, Stellar does not use a Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Instead, under the Stellar Consensus Protocol, a construction of the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus mechanism, each validator node decides which other validator nodes to trust, also known as a quorum set (or quorum slice). The validity and order of transactions are then determined through a system of federated voting where candidate transactions are first nominated to be included in the ledger, followed by a ballot protocol to ensure the unanimous confirmation of nominated transaction sets.

On Stellar, any asset can be tokenized (minted) onto the network for tracking, custody, and trading. Additional built-in features for assets issued on Stellar include custom KYC requirements (or compliance with other regulatory requirements) for tokenholders, multi-signature account control, and time-locked escrow. In partnership with Cheesecake Labs, Stellar offers the Stellar Asset Sandbox, which includes no-code tools for asset issuance and management as well as a testnet environment.

History

Stellar was founded in July 2014 by Jed McCaleb, David Mazières, and Joyce Kim to build “a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money in any pair of currencies.” Prior to co-founding Stellar, McCaleb co-founded Ripple, a payments network for cross-border payments. In July 2013, McCaleb left Ripple over reported disagreements with fellow founders. In the blog post “Introducing Stellar,” published on July 31, 2014, it was announced Stellar would be developed by the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), which would also control the entire initial total token supply (~105.00 billion XLM).

Initially, the Stellar network used a modified version of the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm as its consensus mechanism until December 2014, when the Stellar ledger forked unintentionally due to network nodes failing to reach consensus. In response, the Stellar team announced it would temporarily run Stellar on one validating node to ensure no ledger forks before implementing a new consensus algorithm. In November 2015, Stellar implemented a modified consensus protocol known as the Stellar Consensus Protocol, whose codebase is not a fork of Ripple’s and was initially described by David Mazières in a whitepaper first published in 2015.

On Oct. 28, 2019, XLM’s annual supply inflation of 1.00% was deprecated following a validator vote. After this, the SDF announced several changes to the XLM token supply allocations on Nov. 4, 2019, which saw ~55.00 billion XLM burned, reducing the total token supply to ~50.00 billion.

In October 2020, the SDF announced it would add support for USDC on Stellar, which went live in February 2021. In June 2021, Protocol 17 was implemented, granting issuers of regulated financial assets the ability to revoke assets in certain situations to comply with regulatory requirements. In July 2021, the SDF introduced Automated Market Makers (AMMs) to Stellar by implementing Protocol 18. On March 24, 2022, the SDF introduced Starbridge, a bridging protocol between Stellar and Ethereum. In October 2022, the SDF announced the Stellar Anchor Platform, a prepackaged software product to help Anchor financial intermediaries offer services on Stellar. On June 8, 2022, Protocol 19 was implemented, introducing offchain payment channels. On Sept. 25, 2023, the SDF announced that Circle’s EURC, euro stablecoin had launched on Stellar.

In 2024, Stellar implemented Protocol 21 and 22 on Mainnet, delivering substantial network upgrades including passkey signing, flexible contract management, improved contract initialization, advanced cryptography support, cost reductions, and performance enhancements. Furthermore, Stellar also launched integrations with leading on-chain data platforms, Dune and Artemis, increasing access to real-time network activity metrics for builders and users. While at the same time, Blockaid, an on-chain security platform joined the Stellar ecosystem. Another key development in 2024 was Stripe integrating with Stellar for crypto payments. Furthermore, by the end of 2024, the GIZ, the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), and Digibank successfully leveraged the Stellar Disbursement Platform (SDP).

In January 2025, the Stellar RPC launched representing a major leap - Stellar introduced EVM-style developer tooling, simplifying wallet and dApp integrations and lowering onboarding friction for Web3-native teams. By the end of the month, the team also announced a partnership with OpenZeppelin, bringing OpenZeppelin's expertise in smart contract standards and security to Soroban.

By February 2025, Etherfuse brought Stablebonds, a tokenized collection of government-issued treasury bonds from countries, to Stellar. At the same time, Ondo's yieldcoin - USDY - was brought to the Stellar network, further expanding the real-world assets within the ecosystem.

In June 2025, Protocol 23 went life on the testnet, which represented a great steppingstone for the upgrade's release on the mainnet in the comming months.

In July 2025, the team announced their new addition - José Fernández de Ponte - taking on the position of President & Chief Growth Officer.

In September 2025, Protocol 23 - Whisk - was officially released. This upgrade introduced unified event data formatting for all transaction types and parallel transaction processing, greatly enhancing developer experience and network scalability.

In October 2025, Protocol 24 upgrade also came out, focusing on scalability, ZK (zero-knowledge) bridge interoperability, enterprise readiness, and network stability. The protocol’s mainnet vote for Protocol 24 resolved archival bugs and brought stable releases for improved infrastructure reliability.

By November 2025, SDF joined Blockchain Payments Consortium - an initiative to enable frictionless, compliant transactions across networks and borders. - as founding member, alongside Fireblocks, Polygon Labs, Mysten Labs, the Monad Foundation, and the Solana Foundation.