History of Stellar

The network technology Stellar was introduced in 2014 by Mt. Gox and Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb and former attorney Joyce Kim. McCaleb established the "Secret Bitcoin Project" website before the debut to recruit beta testers. Together with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, the nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was established, and in July of that year, the initiative was formally launched. Stripe provided $3 million in seed money to Stellar. A decentralized payment network and protocol with a local currency, stellar, was introduced as Stellar.

The network has 100 billion stellars at inception. Of those, 25% would be donated to other nonprofits promoting financial inclusion. In exchange for its initial seed investment, Stripe gets 2%, or 2 billion, of the stellar. The digital money, which was formerly known as stellar, is now known as Lumens or XLM. The first bitcoin exchange in Brazil, Mercado Bitcoin, declared in August 2014 that it would be utilizing the Stellar network. By January 2015, Stellar had about $15 million in market capitalization and 3 million registered users on its network.

In April 2015, the Stellar Development Foundation published an updated protocol with a new consensus method, and it went live in November of that same year. SCP, a cryptocurrency protocol developed by Stanford professor David Mazières, was utilised by the new algorithm.