Stellar is a decentralized sustainable network that settles peer-to-peer financial transactions. It is both a cross-currency transaction system and a platform for digital asset issuance, designed to connect the global financial infrastructure. It was released in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim. Since then, it is maintained by the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports its technology development and growth.

The Stellar network aims not only to make cross-border payments quicker and at a low cost, but also to expand access to systems more reliable than the conventional banking and remittance that is currently used. Its approach is to integrate distributed ledger technology into the existing financial infrastructure. The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), allows simultaneous access, validation, and updating of records in an unchanged way to a network distributed across multiple entities or locations.

The Stellar system has its native token, the Lumen (XLM). Lumens cannot be mined. Instead, the supply of Lumens is controlled by Stellar. Originally, 100 billion Lumens were created and the supply was originally inflating by 1% per year. In October 2019 the organization decided that it would be optimal to estimate how much it could actually use over a 10-year timespan and adjust the supply proactively. Thus, the 1% inflation was removed and 55 billion Lumens were burnt leading to a max supply of 50 billion Lumens.

XLM uses an algorithm called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), that keeps everything in sync. This protocol provides a way to reach consensus without relying on a closed system to accurately record financial transactions.