

Stellar is a Layer 1 protocol optimized for low-cost, fast cross-border payments and asset tokenization. It targets financial inclusion by enabling money movement in corridors underserved by traditional banking, particularly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) coordinates protocol development and ecosystem grants.
SCP uses Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA): nodes each define their own “quorum slice” (a set of trusted nodes), and consensus emerges from overlapping slices without requiring global agreement or energy-intensive mining. This enables 3-5 second finality and very low transaction fees (fractions of a cent) while maintaining Byzantine fault tolerance.
XLM has a fixed supply of 50 billion tokens (after SDF burned 55 billion in 2019, reducing total supply from 105 billion). SDF controls a large treasury and periodically releases tokens for ecosystem development and grants. The 2019 burn was a significant supply reduction event; no comparable burns have occurred since.
Circle issued USDC natively on Stellar, making it one of the primary settlement currencies for Stellar-based payment applications. MoneyGram and Stellar have integrated USDC as the settlement layer for cash-to-crypto remittance corridors, allowing users to deposit cash at MoneyGram locations and receive USDC on Stellar for cross-border transfer.
MoneyGram integration for USDC corridors is the flagship real-world deployment. Various African fintech corridors (particularly Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya) use Stellar rails for cross-border settlement. The Central Bank of Ukraine has explored Stellar for CBDC infrastructure. Adoption is real but concentrated in specific corridors rather than broadly scaling across global payments.