Stellar

Put simply, Stellar is an open network that allows money to be moved and stored. When it was released in July 2014, one of its goals was boosting financial inclusion by reaching the world’s unbanked — but soon afterwards, its priorities shifted to helping financial firms connect with one another through blockchain technology.

The network’s native token, lumens, serves as a bridge that makes it less expensive to trade assets across borders. All of this aims to challenge existing payment providers, who often charge high fees for a similar service.

If all of this sounds familiar, it is worth noting that Stellar was originally based on the Ripple Labs protocol. The blockchain was created as a result of hard fork, and the code was subsequently rewritten.

• The Stellar network is an open source, distributed, and community owned network used to facilitate cross-asset transfers of value.
• Other tokens can be created on the Stellar network aside from Lumens. Like Ethereum, the Stellar blockchain can house other token types, for example tokenized versions of fiat money can be created to help facilitate cross-asset transfers of value. Due to tokens being able to be issued, exchanged, and transferred via the Stellar Network, Stellar is one of the only other choices for ICOs aside from Ethereum (but not the only other choice; for example the Tron network can handle ICOs as well).
• Like Ripple, Stellar can handle exchanges between fiat-based currencies and between cryptocurrencies.
• Lumens have low fees (each transaction has a minor fee—0.00001 lumens—associated with it).