Where to buy Stellar

Stellar launched in 2014, co-founded by Jed McCaleb, with a clear mission: make moving money as easy as sending an email. The network is optimized for payments and for issuing and trading digital versions of real-world currencies, settling transactions in three to five seconds for a tiny fraction of a cent.

Its focus is financial inclusion and remittances. Stellar powers tokenized fiat and stablecoins, and partners such as MoneyGram have used it to bridge cash and crypto, while USDC issued on Stellar gives users a low-cost digital dollar in regions where banking is limited.

XLM, the native asset, pays the small network fees and helps protect against spam. Stellar stopped its early inflation in 2019 and burned a large portion of supply, leaving a fixed cap of 50 billion XLM rather than the open-ended issuance of some rivals. The non-profit Stellar Development Foundation stewards the network.

Because it is cheap, fast and widely listed, XLM is straightforward to buy with fiat. Its value still moves with the broader crypto market and is not guaranteed by its payment use cases.