The analyst said that the reason for undervaluation was the pressure on the management of Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). The expert noted that since its creation, this organization has received only $3 million as an investment in the development of the ecosystem of Stellar Lumens. As a result, the creators of the project had to sell some of their own XLM in order to invest in the expansion of the product.

Guy praised the management of Stellar Lumens for making it as transparent as possible. The developers sold about 3 million XLM ($ 810 thousand) in 2021. Also the creators of the project said that, as originally planned, will sell their own XLM in portions, to further invest these funds to improve the product and the creation of new services.

An analyst from Coin Bureau said that the main reason for the undervaluation of the virtual asset is the lack of high demand combined with the fact that the representatives of SDF have to sell their tokens. 

According to the expert, institutional investors also did not get involved in buying XLM because of its potential similarity to another virtual currency, Ripple (XRP). The latter has a huge problem with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The regulator claims that XRP is unregistered.

Stellar Lumens and MoneyGram

However, Guy noted that a lot may change in 2022 thanks to a partnership with MoneyGram. Earlier on its official website, the company announced the launch of a pilot project with SDF. The partnership agreement will include a unique system for buying cryptocurrencies for fiat.

•     Emission mechanisms and principles
•     Consensus building mechanisms
•     Architectural benefits and risks
•     Licensing and legal aspects 

Stellar is a decentralized platform for P2P currency transactions such as payments and exchange. Stellar’s goal is to bring banks, payment processors and people together for fast, cheap and secure transfers of funds. One of the main directions of Stellar is the exchange of Stellar-based assets using a built-in decentralized exchange.

The platform was created in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim and initially operated on the Ripple protocol. Later on, a new original protocol was developed, the source code of which is publicly available. Work on the new protocol was launched in November 2015.

The main reason why Jed McCaleb had left Ripple and created Stellar was the accusation of the Ripple management that they are interested solely in increasing its own profits, that the payment system is centralized, and its management exploits it, among other things, by “swinging” the rate of the built-in currency of the XRP system. Thus, the platform was originally a “clone of Ripple”, eliminating its drawbacks related to the lack of transparency in financial flows, organizational structure, etc. Subsequently, the projects chose different development paths.

Stellar’s visibility has been boosted by the launch of several major projects in collaboration with IBM, a giant of IT.

Emission mechanisms and principles

The platform’s native token is Lumen. The ticker is XLM or STR. The more common ticker XLM will be used further in the text.

The coin is referred to by two tickers, since it was originally called Stellar, and not all exchanges have changed the designation. The name change occurred when the Stellar protocol was launched in 2015 in order to separate the name of the native cryptocurrency from the name of the platform and the non-profit organization that operates the platform.

100 billion Lumen tokens were issued when the platform was launched in 2014.

Tokens are generated weekly by the protocol to create an artificial inflation of 1% per year. Tokens are distributed to the address that receives more than 0.05% of the votes of the entire network. You can read more about voting on the official website . However, the situation in which one address on the network receives a sufficient number of votes is almost impossible. As a result a number of resources have appeared, which launch pools to collect votes and then distribute XLM among those who voted for the pool. Thus, the basic strategy for distributing inflationary tokens could be different, without requiring the use of third-party services to work. 

The Stellar Foundation has developed a token ditribution program in order to diversify the distribution. Distribution of tokens:

• 50% – Direct Registration Program, which aims to distribute tokens to the largest number of people around the world. Programs are carried out in stages, while the methods of distribution may differ.
• 25% – distribution within the partner programs: for grants and various kinds of organizations that contribute to the development of the Stellar ecosystem.
• 20% – distribution among owners of BTC (19%) and XRP (1%).
• 5% to the Stellar Fund for operating expenses. 

It is worth noting that much fewer tokens were distributed than originally planned. This is due to the fact that the owners of bitcoin wallets had to leave an application for participation. Unclaimed XLMs were sent to the Stellar Foundation and the Build Challenge. Stellar Build Challenge is a special reward program for development and integration within the Stellar ecosystem.   

XLM is the native currency of the platform. To protect against transactional spam, a small fee of 0.00001 XLM applies to each transaction. XLM is also used as a “bridge” for multicurrency transactions (in case two assets are exchanged between which there is not sufficient liquidity but at the same time there is liquidity in a pair of each of them with XLM).

Starting with version 12 of the protocol, Stellar abolished the inflationary mechanism.

Consensus building mechanisms

 The Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) works on the basis of the Byzantine Generals’ task. In distributed systems, the task of Byzantine generals is the task of reaching consensus in a network of unreliable calculators. It sounds something like this:  the task of interaction between several remote nodes that received a message from one control center. Some of the nodes, including the center, can be compromised, but despite this, it is necessary to make the right decision. 

SCP uses the Federated Byzantine Agreement ( FBA) model , which introduces the concepts of quorum and quorum slices to describe how it works. In a distributed system, a quorum is a set of nodes sufficient to reach consensus. The Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) introduces the concept of quorum slices (qourum slice) – a set of nodes, the opinion of which is enough to make a decision by one specific node.  

The main difference of the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) is that each individual node chooses quorum slices for itself, the solution of which it trusts. A node can select multiple trusted quorum slices and wait for them to approve the transaction. These nodes, in turn, also expect transaction approval from their quorum slices. In this way, a sufficient number of network votes are collected and a system-wide consensus is formed.

The intersection of quorum slices as an important parameter of the system’s performance and ability to lead to the final state. The protocol is only operational if any two quorum slices have an intersection. An illustration of the intersection is depicted below. In the first case, the groups of nodes have no intersection and, accordingly, the groups of nodes can come to different solutions. In the second case, the quorum intersection condition is met and the system will reach a system-wide consensus.

Each node is responsible for maintaining quorum slice intersections. The primary method is to responsibly select large quorum slices by a node whose members are authoritative enough to risk their reputation. Removing malicious nodes from a quorum slice does not lead to a loss of its integrity. Thus, the main parameter of the finiteness of reaching consensus is the establishment of trust links between the selected node quorum slices.

The process of reaching consensus takes the form of multi-stage voting: nodes propose transactions, vote for them and confirm the vote with a special ballot when the quorum threshold is reached. The confirmed results are then recorded and spread over the network. If the network does not come to one decision within the allotted time, voting goes to a higher round and the nodes vote again, while they can cancel their votes using a special function (abort) and vote for a different value.

A technical description of SCP is available on the official Stellar website at the link . It is worth noting once again that in order to reach consensus, there must be an intersection between quorum slices. In the current implementation, this is mainly achieved due to the fact that the nodes launched by the Stellar foundation are considered “trusted” and users add them to their quorum slices. This creates a risk in case of failures in the operation of these nodes, leading to a shutdown of the network. 

It is worth noting that the algorithm does not include any reward mechanisms for validators, which can negatively affect an increase in their number and expansion of geography and, accordingly, at the level of project decentralization.

Architectural benefits and risks

The architecture of the Stellar protocol is based on the concept of registry (a ledger). The registry reflects the current state of the system: a list of all accounts, balances, orders of the built-in decentralized exchange, etc. The first register in history is called the genesis register (by analogy with the genesis block,). Each ledger is cryptographically linked to a unique previous state of the ledger, forming a chain. Updating the state of the registry occurs through the execution of rounds of the consensus algorithm.

One of the main features of Stellar is the ability for users to use any assets, create their own assets and exchange assets among themselves. All transactions with assets in Stellar, with the exception of XLM, are carried out on the basis of a system of credits. To implement these capabilities, Stellar has created special entities – anchors.

Anchors are trusted organizations that release assets in the Stellar network. The role of anchors can be performed, for example, by banks or payment systems. The participant chooses the anchor they trust in themselves, while trust in other system participants is not required. Each anchor has its own account.

Anchors perform the following functions:

•     Accept network member deposits and issue appropriate credits to the member’s Stellar registry address. Credit corresponds to some currency, for example, USD.
•     Allow you to withdraw funds through an issued credit.

Algorithm of user interaction with gateways:

1. The user makes a cash deposit to the anchor account.
2. The gateway issues a credit for the funds that ended up in the deposit account.
3. A user can send a credit to any user who has an account in the system.
4. The recipient of the credit can convert it into real currency by transferring the credits to the anchor account.

Thus, Stellar implements the ability to link digital assets with real assets. At the same time, additional restrictions are not imposed on the transfer of credits among users, for example, when the credit is linked to fiat currency, the user will be able to make cross-border payments quickly and with a minimum commission.

In order to protect the network from congestion by creating a huge number of addresses (malicious spam), there is a requirement according to which at least 0.5 XLM must always be on each balance sheet. It also helps to clean up the registry from abandoned addresses.

Licensing and legal aspects

In 2014, the Stellar Development Foundation was created. It is a non-profit foundation whose creators can benefit neither from its work, nor the sale of stocks. The Foundation is registered in the state of Delaware, USA. The fund’s initial funding of $ 3,000,000 was received from Stripe and subsequently redeemed with 2 billion lumen tokens (XLM). Also, 5% of the initial issue of tokens is traded on exchanges and used for operating expenses such as employee salaries, office expenses, educational and affiliate programs, etc.

Additional items of income for the foundation are annual contributions from its members and charitable contributions from third-party companies or individuals. The creation of the fund was primarily motivated by the desire to avoid criticism of the project, similar to criticism of Ripple, where executives were blamed for exploiting the system to make income for themselves.

In May 2017, the creation of a commercial organization Lightyear.io was revealed. It was supposed to focus on expanding the system of services based on Stellar, attracting partners, etc. Later the company was renamed to “Interstellar”.

All project software is licensed under the Apache license version 2.0. This license allows commercial use, modification and / or distribution.

Stellar is a middleware for integration between financial products and institutions. Stellar is not a licensed financial institution / operator. If an organization plans to accept deposits and make credits in the Stellar network, then it may need to obtain a specialized license, such as a Financial Services Provider (MSP) license. Integrators are responsible for meeting all KYC / AML authentication requirements themselves. However, Stellar has released tools to help organizations verify KYC / AML compliance. 

• Team
• Advisors
• Partners
• Investors
• Competitors

Team

On the official website you can see the main composition of the team, including:

• Jed McCaleb – Developer, co-founder of Stellar Development Foundation. He has extensive experience in IT and business. Creator of the eDonkey2000 file-sharing network, one of the co-founders of Ripple, creator of the Mt.Gox exchange.
• David Mazières is a Senior Fellow, co-founder of the Stellar Development Foundation Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he leads the Secure Computing Research Group and the Blockchain Research Center. David is the author of a technical White Paper describing the SCP consensus algorithm.
• Nicolas Barry –  M.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, and has extensive experience in IT, including work at Microsoft and Salesforce.
• Keith Rabois – Board member. Investment partner at Khosla Ventures. Previously held executive positions at Paypal, Square, was a board member at Yelp, and VP of Business Development at LinkedIn.
• Denelle Dixon – CEO and Executive Director Before joining Stellar, Dixon served as COO of Mozilla, one of the most successful mission-driven employee-source organizations.
• Lin-Hua Wu – Member of the Executive Board. leads internal and external communications, brand marketing, and analyst relations at Dropbox. Previously, she ran corporate communications at Square Inc. and was a partner at the Brunswick Group.

The official site lists 11 team members and four board members. There are 118 people listed on the Stellar Development Foundation linkedin page right now. There is also a section on the official site with a large number of open positions. 

Advisors

The official website lists 6 advisors, including:

• Matt Mullenweg – Founder of WordPress.com. Experienced entrepreneur, developer and angel investor.
• Greg Stein – Director of the Apache Software Foundation. An advocate of open-source software, member of the Python Software Foundation, and helped launch Google’s open-source hosting platform.
• Patrick Collison – Co-Founder and CEO of Stripe.

Partners

Among the partners of the project are such companies as:

• Bankhaus von der Heydt – one of the oldest banks in the EU and developing a stable cryptocurrency pegged to the Euro.
• IBM uses Stellar for their international remittance system.
• Tempo Money Transfer uses Stellar as one of its transfer tools.
• Moneygram – a cross border P2P payments and money transfer company.
• AnchorUSD – develops a stable cryptocurrency backed one-for-one to the US dollar.

More about partner projects, which use Stellar protocol can be seen on the official website. 

Investors

Stellar’s official website states that the initial $3 million investment in the project came from Stripe, which was later redeemed in XLM tokens. Also listed as corporate investors are BlackRock, Google.org and FastForward.

Competitors

The main competitors of Stellar can be called cryptoprojects aimed at creating a fast and convenient payment protocol.

One of the competitors of Stellar Lumens is the Ripple platform (the comparison of the two platforms and the competition between them is described in this article). Originally, Stellar was based on the same source code and was considered a fork of Ripple at the beginning of its existence, however, over time, it gained full independence. Ripple is often criticized by experts who believe the platform is centralized and controlled by the commercial structure of Ripple Labs. In addition, for a long time Ripple’s code was closed, unlike Stellar. Now Ripple mostly cooperates with institutional clients.

A large number of cryptoprojects are working on the creation of a convenient payment protocol, among them such projects as Nano, Dash and many others. An important feature of Stellar is the ability to link the issued token to another asset, which allows a more familiar way to integrate the solution into current payment systems. However, it should be taken into account that binding relies not only on the technical capabilities of the protocol, but also on the fact of trust in the gateway.

In terms of the ability to create smart contracts and decentralized applications, Stellar can be compared to projects such as Ethereum, Eos and others. However, in Stellar, this direction is not the main and underdeveloped. Also, for example, on the Waves platform it is available to issue their own tokens, create applications and smart contracts, as well as there is a decentralized exchange.

At the moment, the main features of Stellar that contribute to its spreading as a payment protocol are its relatively high throughput, fast confirmation of transactions and low fees.

• • Applicability
  • Projects powered by Stellar
  • Trust Index
  • Advantages and disadvantages

Stellar is one of the widely known cryptoprojects, this is facilitated by a long history, high capitalization, the prominence of the founders, and the presence of partnerships with large companies. It is worth noting that despite the average high recognizability of the project, the bright news occasions associated with it do not arise too often. For a while there was a little criticism in the project’s community of the team for not paying proper attention to marketing. By now the situation has improved somewhat in a positive direction, for example, the team has plans for conferences. Despite the lack of active marketing, big occasions for the crypto environment such as the launch of a joint project with IBM, for example, could not go unnoticed. Most publications have published articles related to Stellar.

Popularity of social accounts:

• Twitter – 697,000 readers.
• Facebook – 27 thousand followers.
• Reddit – 207 thousand followers.

Applicability

According to stellar.expert explorer (at the time of writing) there are a total of 6’177’814 accounts registered online, with 45’195 of them active during the same day. Also during the last day 258’953 payment transactions were processed.

Graph of the total number of accounts and the number of active accounts (stellar.expert):

As can be seen from the graph, despite the increase in the total number of accounts, the number of active accounts is decreasing.

In total, 111 public nodes were launched in the Stellar network, which is quite small for a project with such a long history. Perhaps, the small number of nodes is due to the fact that the SCP algorithm does not provide any incentive mechanisms for the owners of the nodes involved in providing consensus.

As of December 3, 2021, the total number of XLM tokens exceeds 50 billion, with about 24.63 issued into circulation (not held by the fund). The distribution of XLM is highly centralized, which forms certain risks for the project.

Projects powered by Stellar

Quite a few companies use the Stellar protocol to perform fast cross-border transfers in their business. Among the launched projects worth mentioning are:

• Deloitte, one of the largest financial advisory firms in the world, which launched a prototype Deloitte Digital Bank solution based on Stellar for international instant payments. As a result, transaction costs have been reduced by 40% and transaction speeds have been reduced to 5 seconds..,
• Tempo uses the Stellar network to reduce costs and increase transparency of money transfers. The company has a network of 190’000 locations in 120 countries, through which customers can make cross-border payments for utilities, phone, health insurance, etc.
• As a licensed mobile operator, Parkway uses the Stellar network to connect Nigeria’s 5 largest telecommunications companies, allowing customers of different services to send money to each other. Parkway develops financial technology for 3’000 customers across Africa, including Ecobank, Wema Bank and Diamond Bank. Their end-to-end financial solutions are used in 30 countries in sectors such as healthcare, education and energy.
• In October 2017, it was announced that IBM was going to use Stellar for the cross-border payments industry. The project is supported by major companies such as National Australia Bank, TD Bank, Wizdraw (HK) of WorldCom Finance and the UN and Swift’s Advancement of Pacific Financial Infrastructure for Inclusion (APFII), a division of Polynesian payment system KlickEx. The new payment system is already built into IBM’s Financial Transaction Manager.
• In 2018, IBM announced the launch of a project for the cross-border payments sphere based on the Stellar protocol, Blockchain World Wire, to which any financial institutions can connect.
• India’s largest private bank, ICICI Bank, uses Stellar technology to execute international transfers.
• SatoshiPay, a micropayment solution, started using Stellar technology due to its low transaction costs.

Trust Index

The Stellar project was launched by Jed McCaleb after he left the Ripple project, where he was also a founder. The reason for Jed’s abrupt departure from Ripple was that the project was too centralized and non-transparent. 

A non-profit foundation was launched to manage Stellar, which is not supposed to make any profit from the project’s activities. Despite the initial goal of forming a truly decentralized project, Stellar also had aspects of centralization, particularly related to token distribution. 

As of December 3, 2021, the Stellar Development Foundation holds just over 50% of the total number of tokens. That said, it’s worth noting that Jed McCaleb is also the founder of Interstellar, a for-profit company that aims to expand the ecosystem of services and partnerships around Stellar. The combination of having a large number of tokens in the hands of the foundation with the presence of a commercial organization with close management raises concerns among many users.

It’s also worth noting that Jed McCaleb is the founder of the Mt.Gox exchange, which has an infamous story with the largest hack and theft of bitcoins in history. Some users associate Jed with the tarnished reputation of this project, but it should be noted that he left it much earlier than the designated events. But in general, having two examples of Jed’s rather abrupt departure from his projects (Ripple and Mt.Gox) is also worrying for users, as it raises fears that one day a similar situation could occur in Stellar.

The premade of XLM tokens, combined with the high centralization of funds, forms the risks of a drop in value if a large number of assets go into circulation. Because of this, many cryptocurrency investors refrain from adding Stellar to their portfolios. In addition, Stellar had an inflationary mechanism (1%), through which additional XLM tokens are added to the circulation, which are accrued to the address that received more than a fixed number of user votes. With this mechanism, firstly, centralized pools that agitate users to vote for their pool with a promise to distribute tokens to voters later can gain an advantage.

Second, the weight of the vote depends on the number of XLM tokens in the voter’s account, and XLM distribution is highly centralized. Thus, a potential risk is formed that some users may constantly shift votes in their favor, getting extra XLMs into their “big” wallets. But as of version 12 of the protocol, Stellar has eliminated the inflationary mechanism, which has had a positive effect on the price of the cryptocurrency.

It is also worth noting that the network lacks mechanisms for rewarding validator nodes, which may have a negative impact on increasing decentralization of the Stellar network, as users have no clear motivation to run a node.

In May 2019, the Stellar network failed to validate transactions for several hours, confirming concerns about the risks in the SCP consensus mechanism used and the centralization of the network. Due to the shutdown of some Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) nodes, the network was unable to reach consensus and confirm transactions. It’s worth noting that no one has lost their funds in the process.

Also in April 2021 there was a shutdown of more than half of the validators, which suspended the network of Stellar for 10 hours. This caused the price of the cryptocurrency to fall by about 20% during the day. SDF engineers later managed to fix the situation, but the reason for the outage remains unknown.

Despite the presence of reaction from the team and the desire to minimize the problem, today there is a risk of a repeat of the network shutdown. It is worth noting that in the event of a node outage, Stellar’s algorithm works differently than most blockchains in the sense that there is no fork in the network, it just stops working.

Some believe that especially for financial institutions this approach is more correct because it reduces the chances of losing money. But in any case, the fact that any network depends on a few nodes signals its instability. And this issue is even more acute for the system, which is declared decentralized.

Advantages and disadvantages

The Stellar team created and is developing a protocol that allows users to make fast, cheap cross-border payments, including in assets tied to familiar currencies. The team’s solution has found application in end-users and crypto projects as well as in the real sector.

The advantages of the project include:

• Extensive opportunities for creating and pegging assets.
• Availability of a decentralized asset exchange.
• A competent team.
• The launch of large projects based on the Stellar protocol.
• Wide popularity and a large user base.

Major disadvantages:

• Centralization of XLM distribution and keeping more than 50% of tokens in the Stellar fund.
• Lack of rewards for validators.
• Potential risks of the SCP consensus algorithm, confirmed by the network shutdown in May 2019 and April 2021.

Deciding which currency to buy at a given moment is very important to the investor. This is the reason why so many people look for price forecasts. Although no one can predict price changes with 100% certainty, forecasting often helps to identify potential suitable coins for investment.

Among the many tokens investors are investing in is Stellar, but before we dive into predicting prices, We need to take a brief look at the platform and the token.

1. What is Stellar?

2. Stellar Lumens Price History.

3. What are the key factors that can affect the price of a Stellar coin?

4. Stellar (XLM) price forecast for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2030

5. Conclusion

What is Stellar?

At its core, XLM is another decentralized payment system, like many other currently available blockchain platforms. The platform was launched in 2014, and since then the developers have been working hard to solve most of the problems that plague the traditional financial system.

The distributed accounting system works by harnessing the power of servers configured in a decentralized way, with data updated every few seconds. One of the main features that sets this platform apart from most others is the way the consensus works.

Unlike the majority of other blockchains, where a transaction is approved by the entire network, Stellar takes a different approach. The FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) algorithm is used by each node to “select” a few other nodes that it deems trustworthy. As a result, transactions are much faster, and Stellar can handle up to 1,000 transactions per second.

Price History of Stellar Coins

XLM, the Stellar token, has experienced a strange path since it hit the market, I dare say unique. It has not followed market trends as obediently as other altcoins.

For the first few years of its existence, the price of XLM was quite low. One reason was that it was in the early days of crypto, and another was that the platform was not used in the real world. From 2014 until mid-2017, Stellar’s price was only a fraction of a cent. Then, around June 2017, the price almost reached $0.05 and then dropped to just over $0.01.

By the end of 2017, Stellar had already announced that it would partner with IBM, which dramatically raised the price to nearly $1. The price went down, reaching a low of $0.2 by the end of March 2018. After that, the lumen price rose sharply to $0.43 a month later.

From that point, the price gradually begins to fall, reaching a low of just over $0.03 in March 2020. After that, a gradual increase begins to appear on the chart, which crosses the $0.1 mark only to fall to about $0.07 in October 2020.

From that point on, the price began to rise, reaching a high of more than $0.7 in May 2021. This was followed by a drop, which, however, hit not only Stellar, but also most of the crypto market during the last 2 months. At the moment (July 16, 2021) the price of XLM is just over $0.23.

What are the key factors that can affect the price of a Stellar coin?

One of the most important problems investors face is how the price of cryptocurrency can change and what changes it. In general, several factors can dramatically affect prices.

Price increases are often seen on platforms that partner with popular companies, and marketing alone is enough to raise the price. For example, look at the price the coin had before and after the announcement of the partnership with IBM. While there aren’t many rumors of a potential partnership with Stellar, a big partnership can easily drive up the price.

Overall popularity and trading volume can also affect the price. Look at it this way: every time some famous person mentions a cryptocurrency, the price goes up. Of course, these trends don’t last too long, but you can make a decent profit if you keep a close eye on these things. The same thing happens the other way around. If an opinion leader talks about a particular cryptocurrency as something negative, the price goes down as most people panic and start selling.

Cryptocurrency regulation has been causing quite a stir in the market for some time. While many believe that regulated cryptocurrency deviates from the original idea of complete anonymity, others argue that with increasing government pressure, this is the only way to avoid prohibition. Either way, the mention of crypto-regulation could cause the price to rise or fall, depending on the nature of regulations. For example, if a large country such as China decides to ban cryptocurrencies in its territory, their prices will go down because fewer people will use them. On the other hand, the more states recognize cryptocurrencies as legal tender, the more likely their value will rise.

Basically, it all comes down to supply and demand. The more widely used and traded a coin is, the higher the price can go.

Stellar Coin Price Forecast for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, 2030

So, what the future holds for Stellar (XLM) and will this coin increase its value in the next few years? I think it will, and I will tell you about the price changes in the next few years.

Predicting the Stellar price is a bit problematic, mainly because it does not follow most trends. However, if we look at past prices, we see a certain pattern.

At the moment, the Stellar price is declining after the market crash we saw about a month ago. However, I believe the market has more or less stabilized already, and it is only a matter of time before the lumen price starts to rise. My guess is that the coin should meet the end of 2021 with a price around $0.5.

Based on my analysis, the price of Stellar should increase by about $0.2-0.3 per year, which means that by the end of 2022, XLM will be worth about $0.7-0.8. Following this trend, the coin will finally break the $1 mark in 2023 or 2024. This leads me to believe that by the end of 2025, we should expect a price around $1.3-1.4.

Given the difficulty of predicting value, especially on coins like Stellar, price increases over the next few years are not so bad.

As I mentioned in the previous section, many things can affect prices one way or another, which means that XLM may not reach $1.3 by the end of 2025, or it may go even further. Unfortunately, there is no certainty in this industry.

Conclusion

When you look at how cryptocurrency prices have moved over the past few years, you’ll understand why no one can be sure how a coin will change its value.

Looking at Stellar, it is even more complicated as people will not base their predictions on past trends of other cryptocurrencies. Regardless, I believe that the coin will start an upward trend in the next 5 years, making it a decent investment with good profit potential.

Stellar Development Foundation investment

According to the press release, Airtm will use the funds raised to develop its own technology platform. The investment also calls for integration with Stellar in 2022.

SDF noted that this is the biggest deal for its venture capital wing. The fund made five strategic investments totaling $24.5 million in 2021. Since launching in fiscal 2020, Enterprise Fund has invested $33.76 million in fintech and blockchain companies.

Airtm is the operator of a P2P cryptocurrency trading platform and a digital wallet that allows users to connect bank accounts. The company is also the issuer of the U.S. dollar-linked stablecoin AirUSD.

According to SDF, 165,000 consumers and businesses used Airtm’s services in 2021, and its platform processed more than 2.5 million transactions worth more than $200 million.

In August 2020, Venezuelan authorities restricted access to Airtm. The opposition planned to distribute through the exchange $18 million seized from incumbent President Nicolas Maduro to healthcare workers.