Stellar Price Tracker (XLM) & Whale Tracker

What is Stellar

Stellar is a payments network built to move money across borders and between currencies quickly and cheaply. Jed McCaleb, who had co-founded Ripple and before that the Mt. Gox exchange, launched it in 2014 with Joyce Kim after leaving Ripple. The non-profit Stellar Development Foundation, funded with an initial allocation of the token, develops the software and promotes adoption among banks, fintech companies and aid organisations.

The native asset is the lumen, ticker XLM. Lumens pay transaction fees, serve as the bridge currency between other assets on the network, and are required in small amounts to open accounts. The live price, market cap and supply at the top of this page refresh automatically.

Stellar's design centres on issued assets: any bank, company or individual can issue a token representing dollars, euros, a commodity or a fund share, and the network's built-in exchange converts between them. That is how USDC, tokenised money-market funds and local-currency stablecoins live on Stellar today.

How Stellar works

Stellar does not use mining or staking. The Stellar Consensus Protocol, designed by the Stanford professor David Mazières, is a form of federated Byzantine agreement: each node chooses a set of other nodes it trusts, and agreement spreads through overlapping trust groups until the whole network converges. Ledgers close every five seconds or so and transactions are final when they do. The approach uses little energy and lets nodes join without permission.

The built-in decentralised exchange holds order books for every pair of assets, and path payments let a sender pay in one asset while the receiver gets another, with the conversion routed through lumens or any intermediate asset automatically. Anchors are the regulated businesses that connect the network to bank accounts and cash: they accept a deposit and issue the matching token, or redeem a token and pay out.

Smart contracts arrived with Soroban, which went live on the mainnet in February 2024 after years of development. Contracts are written in Rust and run in a WebAssembly environment, with fees designed to stay predictable under load.

Supply and tokenomics

Stellar created 100 billion lumens at launch with one percent annual inflation. In 2019 the community voted to end inflation, and the Stellar Development Foundation burned 55 billion lumens that it judged it could not deploy usefully, cutting the supply to 50 billion. No new lumens are created now, and the small fee on every transaction, a fraction of a cent, is paid into a pool rather than burned.

The foundation still holds a large share of the supply in a published mandate split between development, ecosystem support, use-case investment and marketing, and it reports its holdings quarterly. That reserve is the main source of new lumens reaching the market, released through grants and programmes rather than sales on a schedule.

History and milestones

Stellar's early years were shaped by its split from Ripple and by the foundation's focus on financial inclusion. IBM used the network for its World Wire bank-settlement product from 2017, and partnerships with remittance companies in Africa and Asia followed. Lumens reached their first all-time high near 90 cents in January 2018. In 2021 Circle launched USDC on Stellar and MoneyGram built a global on-and-off ramp on the network, letting users convert cash to USDC and back at its agent locations.

Soroban's 2024 launch made Stellar a smart-contract platform, and institutional issuers followed: Franklin Templeton's tokenised money-market fund, Wisdom Tree's digital funds and, in 2025, PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin all launched on Stellar. The United Nations refugee agency uses the network to deliver aid in USDC. Lumens rallied strongly in late 2024 alongside XRP as the US regulatory climate shifted, and the foundation's work on compliance tooling positioned the network for banks.

What people use Stellar for

Remittances and cash access lead. MoneyGram's integration lets people in dozens of countries walk into an agent, hand over cash and receive USDC in a wallet, or the reverse, which is a rare bridge between the on-chain and cash economies. Fintech apps in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia use Stellar rails for cross-border payroll and business payments because settlement is fast and fees are negligible.

Tokenised funds and stablecoins are the growth area. Asset managers issue fund shares as Stellar assets that settle in seconds and can be held in self-custody, and stablecoin issuers choose the network for its compliance features, such as asset freezing and allow-lists, which regulated issuers require. Lumens themselves see most use as the bridge asset and fee token behind those flows.

Where to buy and trade Stellar

XLM is listed on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bybit, Bitstamp and nearly every other exchange, with liquid pairs against the dollar and major stablecoins. Exchange-traded products tracking XLM exist in Europe, and US issuers filed for spot funds in 2025.

For self-custody, Lobstr, Vibrant and Freighter are the common wallets, and Ledger and Trezor devices support the network. New accounts need a minimum balance of one lumen to exist. Exchanges require a memo on deposits, and sending without it can delay or lose funds.

Risks to understand

Stellar's value depends on institutional adoption that has come slowly and on competition from stablecoins on every other chain, which now offer the same cross-border use case. The foundation's large holdings give it outsized influence and a steady supply of lumens to distribute. Trading volume is often driven by XRP's moves rather than by Stellar's own news.

Lumens are volatile and spent years far below their 2018 high. Issued assets on the network carry the credit risk of their issuers, not of the network. This page is a reference for the data above, not investment advice.

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