Stellar Lumens (XLM) passed another milestone today with the announcement that 1 million accounts have been created on the protocol’s distributed ledger. This news bodes well for the future growth of the project, which like almost every other altcoin out there has seen the price decimated in the 2018 bear market.
Stellar’s Swift Adoption
Although 2018 has been rough on almost all coins and tokens in crypto, some projects are making strides in the background and setting themselves up for greater movements when the market eventually turns.
Stellar made news over the summer with the revelation that IBM is supporting the release of Stronghold USD; a stablecoin similar to Tether, to be transmitted on the Stellar blockchain, which forked off from Ripple in 2014 (although at this point the code has diverged quite far).
As Stellar has a much shorter block time than Ethereum (on which Tether runs), combined with very low transaction fees, the $135 billion tech giant hopes that the Tether rival will come to be used not only as a convenient store of money during crypto market downturns but as a tool for fast international financial settlements even outside the world of crypto.
Stellar is also making inroads into the Middle East, having in July obtained Shariah Compliance certification for monetary transfers and tokenization of real-world assets from the Shariyah Review Bureau, a Bahrain based religious organization licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain.
Although religious approval of financial services may seem strange by the standards of many Western countries, the Stellar Foundation have stated that they are confident it will open many doors for them in approaching financial institutions in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
1,000,000 accounts
Ultimately adoption of any cryptocurrency is going to depend on getting people to actually use the platform. Stellar’s user base has been growing slowly but steadily in the last year, and since this summer has seen a large increase – one some critics believe has been fuelled in large part by Diruna – a project running on Stellar that rewards users for creating multiple accounts.
It is unclear exactly how many members of the Stellar community are taking part in this questionable promotion, but it does put the ‘one million users’ claim in a somewhat different light. It is important to remember, however, that the Stellar userbase was growing steadily before Diruna got rolling, and with everything else the project has going for it, Stellar remains a project to keep your eyes on.
