Content:
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.
