“If only I had enough Bitcoin to buy all these altcoins” is a question that every trader has probably asked him (or her) self more than once. With the prices of most altcoins tanking way off their all-time high valuations since the turn of the year, someone might suggest that you should line up your portfolio with every currency on the market. Still, a coin needs to have good FA behind it to compliment the fact that it’s cheap, otherwise people would be all over Bitconnect and its massive discount.
There are many such projects out there and Stellar Lumens (XLM) is one of them. Stellar Lumens is a project focused on the financial sector, looking to become an affordable intermediary that will solve the issues related to traditional banking services (fees, speed of value transfer, access to banking in third world sectors). The platform allows users all over the world to send their money across borders at almost no cost an in a matter of seconds. And users have indeed picked up on this, with XLM recording a stellar rise in its user base during the last year.
One of the main catalysts of this increased adoption is the fact that Stellar Lumens is slowly becoming adopted by real businesses. The biggest positive development on this front has been the partnership with IBM, one of the biggest computer technology giants out there. IBM is a major technology supplier of the financial sector and this could help XLM adoption massively in the long run. SatoshiPay, Kin Foundation, LALA ecosystem and BloomX are among the recent businesses to implement XLM as a payment system on their platforms.
Recent news about XLM include the fact that NASDAQ, the famous US stock market, came out in support of the project by naming it as one of 20 cryptocurrency start-ups that have the biggest potential for growth. This will definitely raise interest in XLM among institutional investors, especially when they realize that NASDAQ might list XLM as one of the initial coins on its upcoming cryptocurrency exchange.
Its biggest competitor at the moment is probably XRP, as they are both fighting for the same $20 trillion USD a year market. While XRP is currently more popular, XLM is much more decentralized than its counterpart and this will serve it well in the long run. Many crypto experts don’t want to have anything to do with XRP, as 60% of it is currently in the hands of the Ripple Foundation. So the feeling around the market is that XLM will ultimately prevail and gain mass adoption over its more centralized opponent.
Price-wise, Stellar has most likely reached the bottom, with a solid period of sideways movement suggesting an accumulation is taking place. Notice that it has been somewhat resistant in its XLM/BTC chart, which might suggest a shakeout will happen sometimes in the future. Still, XLM is currently traded at around $0.29 and this might not be the worst time to buy it, as it has all the fundamentals it needs to break out during the next bull run.
