On September 10, 2019 while I was in London, UK at the Python core dev sprints, I got a message from a user named "spacedrop" on Keybase. The message said I was being given 356.2904939 XLM as a surprise gift of "free Lumens worth $20.98 USD" from the Stellar Development Foundation. All of that screamed "cryptocurrency" which isn't my thing, so my initial reaction was this was some scam by someone who randomly messaged me on Keybase trying to get me to buy into some new cryptocurrency. But then I realized that Keybase wouldn't let a random person message me like that. Curious, I read the rest of the message and found a link to Keybase's "airdrop" announcement which explained that Keybase was actually facilitating the message. Trusting Keybase wasn't getting into anything nefarious, that enticed me enough to dig a little deeper into Stellar and find their overview page which has the following summary:
Stellar is a multi-currency payment backend that tens of thousands of people use every day. It’s decentralized, open-source, and developer-friendly, so anyone can issue assets, settle payments, and trade.
Stellar is a blockchain, but it works more like cash—Stellar is much faster and cheaper than bitcoin, for example. And it uses far less electricity.
Okay, that sounds nice. But when I was poking around the web site and I found a code of conduct and a roadmap that both seemed reasonable, that's when I decided to dive into Stellar and I came out thinking that's it's actually a rather cool piece of technology for people to track "what they own ... and and what they want to do with what they own".
So this blog post is basically me writing down what I learned about Stellar and why I found it interesting from the perspective of trying to find a cheap, secure way to send remittance to the United States from Canada (which, spoiler alert, Stellar can't do for me yet, but the technology is there if someone would let me get CAD on to the Stellar network).
What is Stellar for?
I will go into more detail later, but to help motivate reading the rest of the blog post, I want to quickly outline what Stellar is. Basically it's a public ledger that tracks ownership of assets. Those assets do not need to be inherent to Stellar, and in fact a key part of Stellar is that 3rd-parties can provide their own assets to have managed on the network.
You can also trade assets on the network. Stellar lets you put out buy and sell orders on the network and the network will exchange these orders with assets as necessary at the best price for you. This is just like a stock market with buy and sell orders, but instead of stock certificates it's assets on the Stellar network. But one extra twist is that since Stellar lets anyone put assets on to the network, the network will do up to 6 different exchanges to try to get you the best value for your assets. For instance, if you're trying to buy spam with bacon, but people are only selling bacon for eggs and buying spam for eggs, the network will do the bacon -> eggs -> spam trade for you to get you the best result.
Now substitute "bacon" for "CAD" and "USD" for "spam" and you start to see how Stellar might be really handy for exchanging money around the world.
Lumens (yes, there's a digital currency)
To start discussing Stellar you need to know about lumens (or XLM for short). There's 100,000,000,000 lumens on the network since it went live, so there's no mining new ones like with Bitcoin. The smallest unit of lumens is called a stroop and it's 0.0000001 of a lumen (and they are named after stroopwafels which my wife and I like, and stroopwafels are Dutch which just makes the Pythonista in me smile 😊).
Now when I read that Stellar had lumens, I 🙄 like this was yet another cryptocurrency that people are just speculating with (which some people are), but when I began to read about what lumens are used for I realized it's actually an anti-spam mechanism and baseline asset to exchange for other things more than a play to make money from lumens themselves.
Accounts
Accounts on Stellar are a public key and a private seed. Nothing crazy, but also nothing terribly difficult to calculate either. So how does Stellar prevent people from creating a ton of accounts to spam the network?
By having a minimum account balance required to even create an account. Since lumens are the original asset on Stellar they are what you need to open an account (and keep it open). As of today it's 1 XLM which is about $0.07275 USD as I write this. In other words it is not a financial hardship to to require having a single lumen to open an account, but it also won't lead to everyone creating 1 billion accounts on their own either.
Trading
So now you have your account, how do you do something as simple as send or receive an asset? Once again, lumens are used as an anti-spam mechanism for trading.
Every change you want to make to the Stellar network is an operation. All the operations you want to do a single unit is a transaction (just like with databases). All the transactions that get resolved end up in a new version of the ledger which tracks the state of the network at that point in time.
Each transaction costs at least the base fee of 100 stroops per operation contained in that transaction. That way you can't flood the network with operations without having to at least pay a little bit for it.
And what exactly are you paying for? Well, there's a limit to how many new operations can occur on the Stellar network per ledger update. Protocol 11 made it so the network votes on what the maximum number of operations per ledger should be, and as of right now it's sitting at 1000 operations/ledger (if you look at any ledger like ledger 25923589 you will see max_tx_set_size
and that shows the network's current operations/ledger rate). Even with ledgers resolving every 5 seconds, that still means there's limited capacity if the network gets backed up (i.e. it's about 200 operations/second). In those instances where there's not enough capacity there's surge pricing.
You specify the maximum base fee you're willing to pay when you create a transaction. An auction is held where your maximum base fee is offered to fund resolving your transaction. In the end, though, you end up paying only what was required for you to get your transaction resolved (e.g. you might offer to pay a total of 1000 stroops as a maximum base fee for your one operation, but if all it took was 150 stroops for your transaction to get resolved during surge pricing then that's all you end up paying).
So you're paying to prevent spam, and you're paying to potentially prioritize your transaction in case the network is backed up. Now currently the network is not at capacity so worrying about surge pricing isn't a big deal, but even if it did increase we're talking about miniscule amounts of XLM. With the price for 1 XLM that I quoted above, 100 stroop is $0.0000007275 USD, so even if you had to go up by several orders of magnitude to get your operation resolved it wouldn't exactly be expensive.
Inflation
One other interesting thing about lumens to help hit home the fact that they are more of an anti-spam mechanism and baseline asset everyone can agree to than an investment vehicle is the fact that the network has built-in inflation. The network automatically distributes 1% worth of lumens compared to the amount in circulation annually. The network also gives back all transaction fees that were collected. This is done to prevent speculating since it keeps lumens from becoming a scarce commodity and something you want to hoard as the value will systematically go down over time.
The way inflation and transaction fees are disbursed is via voting for an account to receive those funds which gets its proportion based on the amount of votes it got (which equates to the amount of lumens that voting account holds). Since an account must hold the votes of accounts in total of at least 0.05% of all lumens in circulation, people typically join an inflation pool. A popular one is https://pool.lumenaut.net/ which redistributes the lumens that the pool acquires back to those who voted for it in proportion to the amount of votes/lumens the account gave to the pool.
Basically there's no reason not to join an inflation pool. It's free lumens and it's easy to do. If you are on Keybase and were part of the airdrop, make sure to go into your lumens wallet and opt into one of the inflation pools as it was not done for you automatically.
Anchors (or what makes Stellar interesting)
So up to this point you're probably wondering how to heck remittance from Canada to the United States might work if everything is being done in lumens and I said they are not meant to act as investment vehicles. And the answer to that is assets and anchors.
Basically anchors join the network and offer tokens which represent assets that the anhor holds. The anchor can then send those assets as tokens to other accounts on the Stellar network, expressing the fact that an account owns those tokens representing that asset. While lumens is the asset we have talked about up until now, anything can be an asset on the network.
Let's say I run a bank and it acts as an anchor on the Stellar network that will generate tokens representing CAD. What that would mean is customers could withdraw CAD cash from their bank accounts and exchange them for CAD tokens on Stellar. My bank would hold the physical CAD in escrow to back the tokens in circulation. This allows people to then exchange their CAD tokens for real/fiat currency at my bank by sending the tokens to their account, whereby my bank would destroy the token so there isn't double-counting of the money in the world.
To take this bank analogy a little farther, think of physical cash as tokens, your wallet as your Stellar account, and the world of Canadian money as the Stellar network. When you withdraw money from the ATM, you are exchanging money in your bank account for a different format; in this case it's physical cash. You can then transact with it at stores, etc. And then eventually that physical cash comes back out of circulation when you deposit money into your bank account and becomes bits in some bank database.
And this is how anchors that back fiat currency work. For instance, AnchorUSD takes money in USD from you and then converts it 1:1 into a token on Stellar for you to send to whomever. It also lets you receive those USD tokens and then convert them back into USD money by destroying the token. Basically it's a gateway between the USD money and Stellar. This is also where lumens comes in, acting as a baseline asset everyone accepts and understands. That way you can transact in and out of XLM as necessary and still end up with what you want. In other words you can think of lumens as an intermediary asset that everyone understands. This also makes the value of lumens not critical if you do your end-to-end transaction at once as it will make lumens just a temporary part of the transaction (if it's even necessary to have it as an intermediary asset).
In order to prevent people from trusting any random anchor, Stellar has the concept of trustlines. Basically it's a way to say on the network, "we both agree that this token represents what the anchor says it does". That way you enter into an agreement with the anchor to avoid getting ripped off.
Why this interests me
When I realized that the Stellar network was set up so that it would be feasible for a CAD-equivalent of AnchorUSD to exist such that I could send family in the United States actual USD that they could deposit into their bank accounts from CAD money in my bank account, that got me excited. Typically I use TransferWise (if you choose to sign up to TransferWise, this is a referral link that gets me and the first couple of people who use it some money), but it takes a few days for the money to arrive and I have to go through some hoops to get the cheapest fee with the fastest result by letting them log into my bank account to check I actually have the funds which has always bugged me from a security perspective.
Add on to that the fact that PayPal is about the only solution I know of for sending small amounts of money internationally – which happens regularly to me when I'm at a conference outside of Canada and the restaurant won't split the cheque – and you start to wonder why there aren't more potential solutions out there for sending money internationally in a fast, cheap manner.
And apparently I'm not the only one who thinks this: IBM has a service called World Wire built on the Stellar network specifically for moving money quickly and cheaply between banks. So now I'm just waiting for someone to set up a CAD-based anchor which acts as an Interac e-Transfer bridge between my Stellar account and my Canadian chequing account so I can send money to the United States cheaply and easily.
Interesting Links
Stellar - an open network for money
Stellar lets you hold, send, and swap digital versions of everyday currencies. Dozens of financial institutions issue assets and settle payments on Stellar.
Stellar Dashboard
Stellar Dashboard.
Keybase Stellar Space Drop, 2 Billion Lumens for the World
Keybase is for keeping everyone’s chats and files safe, from families to communities to companies. MacOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and Android.
If you were a Keybase user before September 9, 2019 you might as well go and collect your lumens and sign up to get the monthly disbursement they are going to be doing for the next 20 months, and remember to sign up for an inflation pool.
Lumenaut Pool
Lumenaut Pool. 100% payout, no fees. By the community, for the community.
If you're looking for an inflation pool.
StellarX
A user-friendly, peer-to-peer marketplace.
Market site which makes all trades free since Stellar itself handles all buy/sell orders itself.
https://www.coinbase.com/earn/stellar/
(If you want to watch some videos from Coinbase and get some free lumens if you have a Coinbase account. If you don't have a Coinbase account and you want to sign up for one, you can use this referral link which will give me some extra lumens.)
Stellar News, Education, and Insights - Lumenauts.com
Lumenauts.com is your source for Stellar news, educational resources, and insights.
A site with a few YouTube videos covering similar things to what the Coinbase videos do, but without having to sign up for anything.
My Keybase Stellar account is:
GDZE4QWQLXHR6SWPOZ2ZUF6JWS3GBKEYQJDKWPZSD7JQTE2XP5GPS4KW
if you want a place to send XLM in order to experience that (I don't need more lumens so please don't view this as me begging for more, it's just that I didn't know anyone with a Stellar account when I started this so all I could do was just stare at my Keybase wallet until I got my free XLM from Coinbase and sent the assets to my own Keybase account).