Stellar Lumens has recently been on a rise. With a quality blockchain and a quick, efficient and safe product, it has been catching the eye of investors and partners, so much so that it has recently moved into 8th place of global coinmarketcap currency list with a market cap of 8 billion dollars. Looking at its graph, we see a token that has recently experienced a period of solid growth, doubling its price in a months’ time.
Most of the market enjoyed a period of sideways movement from Bitcoin, which resulted in quality alts picking up the slack and rising in price. XLM hasn’t lagged behind for sure, partially motivated in its growth by Bitfinex announcing support for it. It has expectedly hit a wall and dipped a bit since Bitcoin started rolling again. Once Bitcoin stabilizes, we should expect a recovery from Stellar as coins with such excellent fundamentals always do.
The future looks bright for XLM, as new developments and updates are popping up on the horizon. CEX.IO has recently announced support for the currency, which definitely helped increase its value. There are rumors of XLM working on cooperation with a couple of messaging apps on creating an in-app payment system.
Another partnership with the Lobstr trading platform is currently in the making. This partnership should give users ability to purchase goods and perform trades with one click of a phone screen.
Lumenette Mobile Wallet
The Lumenette mobile wallet (Android Play Store; iOS Test Flight) is out of beta since 10 days ago!
Lumenette allows users to send Lumens to anyone on their personal contact list via phone/email, whether they have heard of Stellar or not. They are aiming to be Venmo for crypto – a user friendly, multi-asset wallet, powered by the Stellar network.
They hope that the ability to transfer to anyone on your phone’s contact list exponentially increases the number of people you can send Lumen to.
Stellar or Ripple?
Will one wipe out the other? A lot of people seem to have the “us or them” mentality in crypto world. Truth is, if we analyze the historical charts we find that Stellar and Ripple have followed very similar patterns during most price movements, save from a few very big news announcements that affected them individually. You can read a full comparison of Ripple vs Stellar here.
This really shows most of the traders (and bots) who drive the price movements associate the two together, if one does well so must the other, and vice versa. At this point many of us know Stellar and Ripple are indeed very different, whether it’s their consensus protocol or the companies’ missions and target consumers.
We are at an early stage of adoption of crypto and the distributed ledger technology, and there will be many casualties along the way as indirect results of newer technologies replacing them and taking their market share. But so far, most of the ones that do fail are due to questionable fundamentals and shady dealings, not so much from the technologies being outdated, since in a sea of open sourced goldmines and talented developers, technological inferiority can be remedied.
The competition between different crypto startups is what propels the technologies forward, this doesn’t just apply to Stellar and Ripple, because many of the cryptocurrencies have a similar end goal, which is becoming the store of value currencies that have the most network utilization. For companies like Stellar and Ripple that go after one of the biggest sectors – financial industry, there is more than enough pie for everyone.
Source: Reddit
While those partnerships are some time away, crypto owners can look forward to a good month of May for XLM. The coin will be a part of the Concensus 2018, a blockchain technology summit, alongside 28 other coins. FairX exchange BETA is planned towards the end of the month, which should help its price even more. Right now the market went through a period of Bitcoin volatility, resulting in many alts suffering a downtrend. Once Bitcoin stabilizes crypto investors should consider investing in XLM, as a period of growth looks more likely to come than not.
