Stellar is an open-source network built to move money quickly and cheaply between different currencies and across borders. Its native token is the lumen, traded under the symbol XLM. The goal is to let a person send one type of value and have the recipient get another, so a payment can cross from one currency or asset to another in a single step. That focus on payments and remittances is what sets Stellar apart from networks aimed mainly at holding value or running complex applications.
Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim launched Stellar in 2014. McCaleb had founded the early exchange Mt. Gox and co-founded Ripple before starting Stellar as a separate project, and Kim is a former lawyer. The network is supported by the Stellar Development Foundation, a nonprofit set up the same year to maintain the protocol and guide its growth. The foundation does not run the network on its own; the software is open source and anyone can take part.
Stellar does not use proof of work, the mining-based approach behind Bitcoin and Litecoin. Instead it relies on the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Rather than having computers compete to solve puzzles, accounts reach agreement through a consensus process among trusted participants grouped into quorum slices. Because there is no mining race, transactions settle in seconds and the network uses far less energy than a proof-of-work chain.
The design is built around bridging assets. A bank, a payment company, or a person can issue a representation of a real-world currency on the network, and Stellar can route a payment through whatever path connects the sender's currency to the receiver's. This makes it well suited to remittances, where someone wants to send money home and have it arrive as the local currency, and to cross-border transfers that would otherwise pass through several banks and fees.
Lumens, the XLM token, serve a few practical jobs on the network. They cover the small fees charged on transactions, which helps discourage spam, and they can act as a bridge asset when no direct trading pair exists between two currencies. In that sense the token is more of a working part of the payment system than a product sold on its own.
Stellar's history is tied to McCaleb's earlier work on Ripple, and the two networks are often compared because both aim at payments and value transfer. They are separate projects with different governance and different technology. Where some crypto networks chase a wide range of uses, Stellar has kept a narrower focus over the years: moving money across currencies and borders with low fees and fast settlement.