What is Stellar Lumens (XLM)
Stellar is the name of a decentralized payment procotole created by an organization of the same name, its token is called Lumen and abbreviated XLM.
Stellar is a non-profit organization created by Ripple's co-founder, Jed McCaleb and his partner Joyce Kim in 2014. His network can support all kinds of currencies (including fiat currency) and his 100% decentralized stock market. % offers to trade assets and virtual currencies. Joyce Kim, the co-founder left the project and works today for Sparkchaincapital, a cryptocurrency investment fund.
Developed from Ripple, McCaleb has significantly modified the base protocol to prevent Stellar from being as centralized as the XRP. McCaleb has indeed preferred to leave the ship Ripple because his vision for the future of the currency was too different from other leaders about decentralization.
Stellar's goal is to provide financial infrastructure to organizations and associations around the world. The operations are processed in less than 5 seconds, the network allows to make more than 1000 per second and its currency is the Lumen (XLM). A user must have a minimum of 20 lumens to keep his wallet active.
As seen above, Stellar does not use the PoS protocol like Bitcoin and the mining system, all the chips were created directly at the launch of the network. Here's how the lumens are shared within the network:
Half or 50% to the interested, distributed to as many people as possible (about 50 billion XLM)
25% are reserved for associations and non-profit organizations (about 25 billion XLM)
20% for people who have BTC or XRP. (about 20 billion XLM)
To finish 5% that Stellar retains for internal operations (about 5 billion XLM)
Operation of Stellar
Stellar uses an open-source protocol, on its network, the servers run a software implementation and use the Internet to connect and communicate with other Stellar servers, forming a global value exchange network.