Stellar

Global transaction

Send and receive money all over the world with the Stellar network.

Transaction speed up to 5 seconds anywhere in the world, at a cost of 1 cent for every 10,000 transactions.

Exchange cryptocurrency dollars into euros, at the best market price

Stellar Lumens

Stellar was made to support digital representations of any currency, but it also has its own built-in token, called the lumen, created to fill a special role in the network. By design, Stellar requires that each account hold a small number of lumens at all times.

This lumen requirement is modest-a few is more than enough for most accounts. The full technical details are covered in Stellar's docs, but, below, we explore some high-level concepts.

Why does Stellar require lumens?

The need for lumens arose out of the fundamental design of Stellar's ledger system. Simply put, it's too easy to use. Without some nominal barrier or cost, the ledger could become filled with spam or nonsense, or used as a kind of arbitrary database system. These outcomes would defeat the intent behind Stellar: to be a fast, efficient payments system.

To solve this, we needed to introduce just the slightest bit of friction to deter bad or frivolous actors. Imposing a minimum balance on each account and a very small per-transaction fee were chosen as these deterrent costs. Right now, the minimum balance is 1 lumen and the minimum per-transaction fee is 0.00001 lumen. These are small enough to keep Stellar widely accessible, but big enough to discourage large-scale bad behavior.

Since Stellar is a universal system for digital money, we could've allowed people to pay these costs in dollars, pesos, yuan or anything else. But we felt none of these were appropriate. First, we didn't want the network to "prefer" any particular national currency-if Stellar used dollars, say, then network prices would stay fixed for Americans but float for everyone else. And, even more, we wanted to create a digital-first asset that embraces the openness of the internet and is independent of economic and political factors.

So we gave the network its own currency, intended solely for denominating network requirements. That currency is "the lumen." As you can see below, there are now 4.3 million Stellar accounts, and each of them uses lumens to meet minimum balance requirements and pay transactions fees.