Stellar

Mission
Our mission is to expand financial access and literacy worldwide.

When individuals have access to financial services and the confidence that those services are working in their best interest, those individuals can independently improve their lives. Yet the current financial system is too costly and complicated, leaving millions of people on the sidelines.

Just as the internet allowed anyone to send an email or create a blog, Stellar’s common financial platform now allows you to easily send, save, and receive money, without large fees or hassle.

LUMENS
Lumens are the native asset of the Stellar network.
Native means that lumens are built into the network. Asset is how the network refers to an item of value that is stored on the ledger.
One lumen is a unit of digital currency, like a bitcoin.
While you can’t hold a lumen in your hand, they are essential to the Stellar network—they contribute to the ability to move money around the world and to conduct transactions between different currencies quickly and securely.
In 2014 the Stellar network launched with 100 billion stellars, the original name of the network’s native asset.

In 2015, with the launch of the upgraded network, the name of the native asset changed from stellar to lumen to distinguish it from 1) the Stellar network itself and 2) Stellar.org, the nonprofit organization that contributes to development of the network.

APPLICATIONS
Several nonprofits and businesses are implementing Stellar as financial infrastructure, particularly in the developing world. One such example is Praekelt Foundation, which will be integrating Stellar into Vumi, its open-source messaging app, to let young girls in Sub-Saharan Africa save money in airtime credits.

Parkway, a licensed mobile money operator, uses the Stellar network to connect Nigeria’s five major telcos, enabling customers of different mobile money services to send money to one another.

Oradian, a cloud-based banking software company, also plans to use the Stellar network to connect microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Nigeria.

In December 2016 more partnerships were announced, including in the Philippines, India and West Africa.

In the month of October 2017 Stellar and IBM created a partnership to increase the speed of global payments.