Stellar

XLM is the native coin of Stellar, a blockchain for payments and tokenised assets.

Stellar is a public blockchain built for sending money and moving tokenised assets cheaply. It launched on 31 July 2014, started by Jed McCaleb, an early founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple, with the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). XLM, also called the lumen, is the network's native coin: every transaction pays a tiny fee in XLM and every account keeps a small XLM balance as a reserve.

The supply is about 50 billion XLM. One hundred billion lumens were created at launch and a 1% yearly inflation added about 5.4 billion more, but validators voted to end inflation in October 2019, and in November 2019 SDF locked away about 55.4 billion lumens it judged it did not need. Transaction fees are not paid to anyone: they go into a locked pool. SDF still holds about 14.8 billion XLM, roughly 30% of supply, which it uses for development, grants and investments.

Stellar does not use mining or staking. Its Stellar Consensus Protocol lets each validator choose which other validators it trusts, and validators, mostly companies and institutions, are not paid. Smart contracts (Soroban) arrived in February 2024, and the network upgrades its protocol several times a year; Protocol 28 went live in September 2026.

Today Stellar is used for stablecoin payments and remittances (USDC, EURC and, since September 2026, USDT0), with MoneyGram among its best-known partners, and for tokenised real-world assets worth about $3.4 billion, most of them tokenised government bonds and money market funds. In 2018 it received a Shariah compliance certificate from the Bahrain-licensed Shariyah Review Bureau.