The launch of the new Stellar protocol has been welcomed by the crypto market: in the last 48 hours the price has increased by 100%.
The price of Stellar Lumens (XLM) has risen by 60% in the last 24 hours and exceeded the $0.2 threshold for the first time since September 2018. This growth came after an announcement by developers about the implementation of a new version of the Stellar protocol by validators.
The update of Protocol 15 came into force at 16:00 UTC on 23 November and introduces two new features, which aim to reduce the complexity for users of applications and services based on the Stellar network.
Until 21 November Stellar Lumens had no particular price fluctuations, but on that date the trading volume started to grow. Bitcoin Rejoin has doubled in the last 48 hours and is at the top of the list of the first 100 currencies for weekly earnings: it has achieved a 125% growth! Some believe that it could be one of the tokens driving the long-awaited „alt season“.
„$XLM Stellar Lumens was the first altcoin he bought. I have never sold them and have accumulated them over the years.
I am delighted to have so many of them now that they are worth $0.7 on average. All the way to Valhalla!“
Initially created as a fork of the Ripple Labs protocol by Jed McCaleb and launched in July 2014, Stellar seeks to reduce the cost of cross-border payments using blockchain. The project is particularly focused on serving areas of the world where access to traditional financial services is non-existent or so expensive that it is prohibitive.
The update to Stellar’s Protocol 15 includes two new elements, designed to improve the user experience while maintaining a high level of protection against „farm attacks“ and other methods that could interfere with the network. A „farm attack“ occurs when multiple accounts are created by a single person, with the purpose of collecting the small amounts of money sent to those accounts by service providers, necessary to activate the account.
According to Stellar’s official blog, the features of Protocol 15 have been under development for over a year and address some of the „major hot keys“ for developers who build applications and services on Stellar:
„After the upgrade, developers can create simpler, better user experiences that reduce the complexity of the blockchain without losing any of the benefits of a fast, affordable, permissionless public registry.
Stellar also recently announced a partnership with East African B2B payment solution provider ClickPesa. According to the blog post, ClickPesa decided to use Stellar, recognising it as an „opportunity to reduce problems related to intra-African cross-border payments and P2P payment activity“.
In October, Stellar made it clear that the stablecoin USDC would migrate to its blockchain in the course of 2021 in order to pursue its goal of simplifying cross-border payments: among Stellar Lumens‘ strengths are extremely low transaction fees and settlement times of just 4-5 seconds.