Where Stellar Lumens are Accepted Locally and Globally
XLM or Lumens are the tokens of the smart contract Stellar payment network which ostensibly aims to decentralized global payments and empower individuals economically. It’s accepted by over 500 businesses worldwide, from Oregonian Hemp farmers to Polish translation services.
Who Accepts Stellar Lumens
Are you an Entrepreneur, freelancer, or manager of a business accepting cryptocurrency?
Should you buy Stellar Lumens?
Many analysts predict that it will gain in value as it’s courting the interests of the legacy financial system. To use the Stellar network you must hold at least one XLM, which is a smart spam prevention measure that bars bad actors. The total Lumen supply was cut in half in 2019, a smart move making it a deflationary currency. It’s actually a nonprofit project which some crypto purists might appreciate. It competes with Ripple which has been plagued with scandal and stricken with an SEC investigation. Both aim to provide financial services to the unbanked, my money would be on Stellar…
However, there is a lot of competition in the micro-payments space; from numerous other cryptocurrencies to legacy financial system offerings. They’ve become entangled with the World Economic Forum (“You’ll own nothing and be happy!”) and Stellar is a candidate for underlying a US Dollar central bank digital currency, which crypto purists should hate!
About
Stellar was made to support digital representations of any currency, but it also has its own built-in token, called the lumen, created to fill a special role in the network. By design, Stellar requires that each account hold a small number of lumens at all times. This lumen requirement is modest — a few is more than enough for most accounts.
From stellar.org
This paper introduces a new model for consensus called federated Byzantine agreement (FBA). FBA achieves robustness through quorum slices — individual trust decisions made by each node that together determine system-level quorums. Slices bind the system together much the way individual networks’ peering and transit decisions now unify the Internet. We also present the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a construction for FBA. Like all Byzantine agreement protocols, SCP makes no assumptions about the rational behavior of attackers. Unlike prior Byzantineagreement models, which presuppose a unanimously accepted membership list, SCP enjoys open membership that promotes organic network growth. Compared to decentralized proof of-work and proof-of-stake schemes, SCP has modest computing and financial requirements, lowering the barrier to entry and potentially opening up financial systems to new participants.
From the introduction of the Stellar whitepaper
