Payments
Designed for cross-border transfers, remittances, disbursements and settlement between financial services.
About the network
What is Stellar?
Stellar is an open, public blockchain designed to connect financial systems and make it easier to issue, send and exchange digital representations of value.
A network for payments and tokenized assets
Stellar provides shared infrastructure where people and organizations can transfer value, issue digital assets and build financial applications. The network is public and decentralized. Its ecosystem includes payment tools, stablecoins, tokenized funds, on/off ramps and decentralized finance applications.
XLM, also called the lumen, is Stellar’s native asset. It is used to pay transaction fees and help meet minimum-balance requirements. Other assets on Stellar are issued by accounts on the network and can represent currencies, commodities, fund interests or project-specific tokens.
How consensus works
Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a federated Byzantine agreement design. Validators exchange messages and reach agreement using quorum slices—sets of other validators each participant chooses to trust. It does not use proof-of-work mining or proof-of-stake staking to decide ledger history.
Why people build on Stellar
Asset issuance
Organizations can issue digital assets on a shared ledger, with issuer settings and asset-specific rules.
On-network exchange
Stellar includes native exchange functionality that can route trades across eligible order books and liquidity pools.
Smart contracts
Soroban adds smart-contract capabilities for applications that require more programmable on-chain logic.
Stellar is infrastructure—not an investment promise
Network design can support fast and inexpensive settlement, but it does not guarantee the value, backing, redemption, liquidity or safety of any specific token. Each asset has its own issuer, permissions, market conditions and legal terms.
Explore the official network information at Stellar’s introduction and Stellar developer documentation.